November 12, 1859: at the Cirque Napoléon - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Léotard “qui tenait le spectateur

sous l’empire d’un Plaisir

indefinissible »

 

did not die on the flying trapeze

in some circus tragedy.

He died of smallpox

 

after inventing a new thrill altogether

at the same time Baudelaire changed the weather

of the modern.

 

Baudelaire doesn’t mention him at all

-          while his “memoirs”, an illiterate scrawl

bring out a snide remark from the Goncourts.

 

“… la hardiesse des sauts périlleux

L’imprévu des case-cou”

-an alexandrine arrested in mid-motion

 

a caesura crossed, from one bar to the other.

His suit, which showed the effortless bother

of the muscular ripple of his too mortal flesh

 

was named for him. In the brief spasm

of his flip and grab, orgasm

washed across the faces of the gaslit crowd.

 

Did Emma B. in outtake carry home some sense

of the sex in this suspense

a syncopation lost?

Baudelaire

 « Today,  23 January 1862, wrote  Baudelaire in his notebook, I was subject to a singular premonition, I felt pass over me the breez of the wing of imbecility. »

“ In 1863, the Figaro inserted an extract from a violent attack by Pontmartin against Baudelaire. In 1864, Figaro condescended to publish a series of the poems in prose. Only, after two publications  (7 et 14 February), Villemessant [the editor] ended this fantasy and here is the reason he gave to the author, to explain this measure : : « « Your poems bore everyone. »

- La Vie doloureuse de Baudelaire, by Francois Porche

I recently re-read one of my favorite books of the nineties, James Buchan’s Frozen Desire, an essay on money that gives as much weight to paintings of Judas, the life of Baudelaire, and Raskolnikov (the final dire dialectical figure at the end of laissez faire) as it does to Adam Smith, Keynes and Simmel – and of course it ignores the horrid Milton Friedman, God rest his soul.

About Baudelaire, Buchan quotes Proust’s phrase that Baudelaire sympathized with the poor as a form of anticipation – which is so wholly lovely that it is almost spoiled by going on (which, after all, is what determines, more than voice or rule, the way a line of poetry runs – it is only over when it is over for good – when nothing on that same line could be added that wouldn’t stain or destroy it – and thus the blank is part of the poem - and thus we fall down the poem as we fall down a ladder, rung by rung). Buchan adds that in the end, as Baudelaire was reduced to rags (but never dirty underwear, according to his biographer Porche), he compiled lists in his last journals. He listed all his friends. They were all prostitutes.

“Here the epoch has arrived of that long haired, graying Baudelaire, his neck enveloped – as per his hypochondria – with a violet scarf; the Baudelaire that was see walking like a shadow, a huge notebook under his arm, in company with the old Guys, at Musard’s, at a casino on the rue Cadet, at Valentino’s. To Monselet who, one evening, in one of those low dives where workers danced, asked him what he was doing there, he replied: I’m watching the death’s heads pass by (« Je regarde passer des têtes de mort. »).”

In these circumstances, when the old bird has almost molted its last feathers and the street reaches out its arms at night to take back its own, there is a moment of collapse and flight. This is when Baudelaire made his journey to Belgium. A complete disaster. And it is when he encountered an article by Jules Janin about Heine, in which Janin, praising Heine, still reproached him for being unreasonably melancholic at times – a point that Janin extended to all of contemporary literature. Where was the gaiety, the song? Where was that lie that eventually became La Traviata? Let’s have a little happy art, for a change. And of course, lets have no unexplained irony – irony is always being chased out of the city, fed hemlock, and in general fucked in the ass and thrown in the gutter – it is the dread of the Janins of the past, just as it is the dread of the Janins of the present.  Baudelaire wrote Janin a letter – which he never sent him. It is a fantastic document, one of those texts in which something blazes out that … it is unfair to call prophetic, as though it were high praise that someone in the past anticipated our moo cow and nukes culture. What blazes out, just as what blazes out of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is the world within the world of the sibyls of modernism …

It is difficult to translate because it is as dependent on sound as one of Baudelaire’s prose poems. Here’s a bit:

 

Quant à toutes les citations de petites polissonneries françaises comparées à la poésie d’Henri Heine, de Byron et de Shakspeare, cela fait l’effet d’une serinette ou d’une épinette comparée à un puissant orchestre. Il n’est pas un seul des fragments d’Henri Heine que vous citez qui ne soit infiniment supérieur à toutes les bergerades ou berquinades que vous admirez. Ainsi, l’auteur de l’Ane mort et la Femme guillotinée ne veut plus entendre l’ironie ; il ne veut pas qu’on parle de la mort, de la douleur, de la brièveté des sentiments humains

2.

Yesterday, I visited the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was an impromptu visit – I was going to a nearby library to return some books. I saw and photographed Sartre and Beauvoir’s tombstone, which was pleasingly strewn with old metro tickets, cheap flowers, and an old paperback copy, bizarrely enough, of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I noticed on a marker that this was where the cenotaph of Baudelaire was, so I also took a look at it – it was, unfortunately, the kind of structure that no bum could leave a metro ticket on. More’s the pity.

 

“Also, I have to admit that, for the last two or three months, I’ve let my character go, I’ve taken a particular joy in wounding, in showing myself impertinent, a talent in which I excel when I want to. But here that isn’t enough: one has to be gross in order to be understood.”- letter, October 13, 1864

It is odd that – at least as I remember it – Sebald, in his last novel, Austerlitz, part of which is set in Belgium, never mentions Baudelaire. Could I be forgetting something? The 1887 edition of the Oeuvres Posthumes contains a biographical introduction by Eugène Crépet that explains the peculiar horror that overcame Baudelaire in 1864 as he familiarized himself with Belgium – it was another piece of his habitual bad luck that he chose to flee from France to, of all places, Belgium. It was the kind of place, as he explains in a letter, where the only thing that could possibly move the people to revolt would be raising the cost of beer. He was tortured by the stink of Brussels – Crépet explains that Baudelaire had an extremely developed olfactory sensibility – and the ugliness of the people and the yawning lack of conversation.

By March, 1866, the devil that had tracked Baudelaire through his life, condemned all his books to failure for various reasons – here a press goes bankrupt, there the critics condemn him, and of course there is that most comic of volumes, Fleurs de Mal, a bunch of filth that can’t compare with the beautiful and healthful lyrics of a Musset – began to pursue its endgame. Baudelaire started suffering more and more visibly from some mental derangement. On a train going to Brussels, Baudelaire asked for the door to the compartment to be opened. It was open. He meant to ask for it to be closed, but he couldn’t find the words for that phrase. They came out backwards. In an article in the Figaro, 22 April, 1866, a journalist noted that Baudelaire’s symptoms were “so bizarre that the doctors hesitated to give a name to this sickness. In the middle of his sufferings, Baudelaire felt a certain satisfaction in being attainted with an extraordinary illness, one which escaped analysis. This was still an originality.” His mother took him to Paris, where he was confined to an asylum. By this time he couldn’t speak, except to say non, cré nom, non. He tried to write on a small chalkboard, but he couldn’t shape the letters. He could, however, gesture, and did.

At his death, a few journals noted, with satisfaction, the death of a degenerate who would now no longer bother the public with his childish pornography. The kind of things you’d expect in, say, the NYT today. Same complete nullity, the same numbskull public intelligence, that combination scold and lecher that is the voice of a million articles, with the point being to erect a wall, a protective blankness, to keep at bay any doubt the consuming animal might form about the system in which it moves and breathes.

The Treadmill of Production

When the Nobel committee in economics gave Nordhaus – a man of infinite environmental ignorance, - their little prize, they put their seal on a neoliberal agenda that is steering the planet into disaster. The committee no longer has an opportunity to right its wrong – to award its prize to an economist/sociologist who has actually written well about the environment: Allan Schnaiberg, who taught at Northwestern until his death in 2009.

In the early eighties, he published an influential book in the field of environmental economics – The Environment from Surplus to Scarcity. It was a book that introduced the concept with which he is most identified: the treadmill of production.

The big controversy in environmental economics is about ecological modernization. Briefly: the Manhattan institute’s all around publicist for “junk science” (otherwise known as science inconvenient to corporations), Peter Huber, proposed that the offloading of costs onto the environment during the twentieth century was caused by the State. If we just took the state out of the equation, private enterprise would develop ways of being greener. The thought was – greener is more efficient. Here’s a link to Huber’s career as a shill. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peter_W._Huber

Schnaiberg’s thesis was different. He coined the phrase, the treadmill of production, to talk about the network effects of industrialization – whereever the ultimate control over industry lay. In a recent essay, The treadmill of production and the environmental state, he revisits his thesis.

“From a conceptual perspective, we might characterize an "environmental state" as encompassing the following feature: whenever it engaged in economic decision-making, considerations of ecological impacts would have equal weight with any considerations of private sector profits and state sector taxes. Put this way, most industrialized nation-states fall far short of this standard. Indeed, it is increasingly true that any environmental policy-making is subject to more intensive economic scrutiny, while economic policies are subject to less and less environmental assessment (Daynes 1999; Soden and Steel

1999).”

Schnaiberg’s paper includes a case study of the recycling industry in Chicago, the study of which was at the origin of his work. It is a study about the structural changes that came about in that industry as it was turned into a regular private sector industry, with the goal of making a profit. I found this interesting as a case just because we remember the old recycling movement in the seventies and eighties. My brothers worked, at that time, heading up maintenance for some apartment complexes. They were both enthusiastic about recycling. They sponsored a cleanup of litter, for instance, along a highway leading into Stone Mountain Georgia. They got their complexes in touch with recycling services. For a couple of years, they devised a mass pick up of Christmas trees – the trees were, I think, going to be used by fish hatcheries or something. My brothers are enthusiasts, and they turned out the family, including my mother, my father, and me – in the Christmas tree deal – to do the various recycling projects.

However, as recycling became simply profit based, the air went out of volunteering. And as they became profit based, instead of applying the private sector efficiency in taking care of the whole spectrum of waste, the spectrum was cherry picked.

Schnaiberg writes:

“First, treadmill organizations [those in the treadmill of increasing consumer demand and cutting production cost by leveraging part of that cost onto the commons, or other people’s property] generally resist environmental regulation with all the substantial means at their disposal. For example, prior to the advent of recycling regulations and programs, container firms fought all forms of

"bottle bills", spending perhaps US$50 million opposing such bills, and succeeding in about 2/3 of the states. Yet even these bottle bills were only indirectly constraining firms. Legislation did not directly mandate a refillable container, but only the imposition of a deposit on all containers. Even in this limited regulation, the refunding mechanisms for the deposit put some cost burdens on non-refillable container manufacturers and/or users. Thus, in recent years in New York state, bottlers have refused to repurchase stockpiled

refunded containers. They have let these accumulate at brokers and large retailers, seeking thereby to mobilize opposition to the bottle bill system. For the remaining 2/3 of states, container manufacturers and bottlers have simply encouraged recycling, and have kept feedstock prices low, and avoided paying labor costs for refilling containers.

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes

infeasible, under pressures from environmental NGOs, firms first dilute the legislation to minimize its impacts on their operations. Then they wait for opportunities to further lighten their regulatory load, whenever the political climate shifts and/or NGOs are elsewhere engaged. In the recycling arena, this has been commonplace. Affected industries have continuously shifted their campaigns to avoid mandatory direct controls on their production and distribution activities. All U.S. government regulations have avoided mandating firms with a "life cycle" responsibility for their own generation of post-consumer wastes, as has

occurred in some European states. Instead, governments had introduced fairly weak mandates for firms, requiring higher "recycled content" of their production. Firms have responded by including post-production waste recycling (a standard economic practice for decades) as part of post-consumption recycling.”

The treadmill aim of weakening the impetus for even voluntary environmental action seems odd, at first, until you take into account what the companies take into account – such behavior leads to an enlarged sense of the interaction between the economy and the environment. It is not just to make more money that the great energy monsters sponsor all their think tanks and pay off all their politicians. When the Great Cheney convention of energy chiefs, in 2001, agreed to put the keebosh on conservation, it was chiefly, when the short term cost benefit is discounted, for ideological reasons: conservation countervails an insane consumerist ethos. If people are allowed, for a second, to fall in love with the planet to the extent of wanting to spare that tree or ice floe, the virus will spread. Questions about the justice of exhausting our resources will emerge. Fundamental questions about ownership and its limits. In fact, people will begin to think that politics doesn’t begin or end with what dumb party you vote for or the latest outrage that we must rush to have opinions on – is CNN more bought and sold than Fox News? Did somebody say something on Twitter? Rather, we will think about why, if Americans (for instance) are so happy, they are so indebted, so unable to stop buying the stupidest things, so unwilling to look at, say, the environmental horrors that are coming home to roost, like something out of St. John of Patmos’s paranoid vision, in fire, flood and plague.

When you have no control over your mind or attention span, you are fucking owned. And that is the resource they are extracting with every hot air soundbyte and fake crisis. The treadmill of production begins in your mind.

Bla Bla Bla

 
Perhaps the only really moving speech in the twenty first century was given by Greta Thunberg, who characterized the official rhetoric around climate change – way around, whilst making as much money and as little change as possible – as bla bla bla. “Build better bla bla bla. Green economy bla  bla bla.” And, as she acutely said, we are drowning in the bla.

Not only is Thunberg correct about every speech by every politician in the past twenty to thirty years – in America from Mr.Bring it on to Mr. Hope to Ms. Break the glass ceiling (symbolically of course) to American first and  Mr. Build Back Better, and every one elsewhere, because frankly, the political class is the blab la bla class, leading us to the zombie apocalypse – but she was also obviously referencing Friedrich Kittler’s famous essay on Lacan, Dracula’s Legacy.

Well, who knows? But Kittler’s essay, which I decided to exercise my brain on – instead of crunching the news of the war in Ukraine, which is like eating shit every morning – does enter, crucially, into the nexus between the recording of the voice and what is brought by the voice – the signifier. Brought into our all too organic ear.
 
"If even Freud’s fundamental rule prescribes speaking at random [ins Blaue], if, further, the most directr way to the pleasure principle, without all those chin-ups “into higher spheres, as laid down by aristotelian ethics” leads to such bla bla , then nothing else will do. In order to tape blabla, magnetic tape, tv cameras and radio microsphones were invented.”

This is a harsh judgment, since we have long fancied that we are a society of facts, when all is said and done, a society that could not have invented magnetic tape or any of the rest of it if we had not a firmer foundation than bla bla. Or, as the first generation of Anglo analytic philosophers used to say, before digging into their disgusting English cuisine at the table in Oxford, nonsense. Nonsense, the magic wand.

Well, Greta and Kittler, I think, see through the nonsense crap. It is the sense, the infinite sensemaking and infinite denial, that is blabla. The most nonsensical of all events – the creating of an earth that will be hostile to the very lives of all the sensemakers – which is fully underway. In our imagination, the rich – who have been credited, with more blabla than even was accorded the apotheosis of Roman emperors, with being “creators”, when their only creation was administration and investment built on other people’s labor – get away. They build spaceships and get away. Or they will all go to Peter Thiel’s Treasure Island and eat lobster.

But will they catch the lobsters? And make the pots they boil them in? I don’t think so.  Bla bla then will eat like a cancer through their bones.  And all our bonery, as even a child, or teenager, can see. The pleasure principle, whip in hand, will take off its mask, then.

Such a price to pay - the nobel prize in economics was awarded to a special specimen of bla, William Nordhaus, who calculated that the extinction of the human race would be a loss of precisely 100 trillion dollars, although who exactly would lose that money, or what money means when there are no exchangers, is not a question for a University of Chicago raree show - and such ignobility and nonsense on our stumbling out of the exit.