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"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads</p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger4541125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-44747816266476951782024-03-18T22:04:00.001+01:002024-03-18T22:04:53.239+01:00The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4OahcP-dc6iCalcGc5yayU94tIC9kXGhtJzP4Jr32550LKZhT73QzORqIclaXiudGV5QIy7UQtyKu1eXw9qk0IuFnl1vnzkM_vgJKBK2Sq8DgevAFzE8jZRlR9eGafECVTfEXsrngYWXaEfjuFTa3LmNYRwANQrRiKWoKoYkrlmwREuyCln5nhA/s640/ak_soustitre1.1jGxUFSkcwRN.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4OahcP-dc6iCalcGc5yayU94tIC9kXGhtJzP4Jr32550LKZhT73QzORqIclaXiudGV5QIy7UQtyKu1eXw9qk0IuFnl1vnzkM_vgJKBK2Sq8DgevAFzE8jZRlR9eGafECVTfEXsrngYWXaEfjuFTa3LmNYRwANQrRiKWoKoYkrlmwREuyCln5nhA/s320/ak_soustitre1.1jGxUFSkcwRN.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nart, a former officer with the DST, French Counter-intelligence. Commentaire, in the past, had published articles in praise of Kojève and even articles by Kojève. <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>Kojève, after WWII, declared himself a “Sunday philosopher”, and had proceeded to devote most of his time to reconstructing France’s economy as an subminister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this post, Kojève became one of the great behind-the-scenes architects of France’s thirty glorious years, that experiment in dirigiste capitalism under the Bretton Woods system which finally came a header in the period of rampant inflation and the Oil crisis of the seventies. Notably, he helping to lay the foundation of the Common Market. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Nart’s article was entitled, ominously, Alexandre Kojevnikov dit Kojève. Scholars of the great Cold War Communist hunts will be delighted to learn that the old rhetorical maneuver of tearing away the legal name to reveal the old, Russian name spying behind it still lives. Nart has nothing new to say about Kojève’s famous Introduction to Reading Hegel, a series of lectures that he gave between 1933-1939 which were edited and published by Raymond Queneau in 1947. Nart’s attention, instead, is all on the Kojève who was giving the Soviets microfilm and packages of documents. What was in those documents, Nart regrets, we can only guess. But they must have been of value! Nart relies for his story on other documents, files that come from now defunct Eastern European and Soviet espionage agencies. Nart has used these sources before, in the 1990s, to claim that Charles Hernu, Mitterand’s first war minister, spied for the Soviets in the fifties. Nart is of the walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be a duck school of thought. His conclusion is that the philosopher was a spy. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">To the calmer mind, though, that a duck and a platypus both have a bill doesn’t make them cousin creatures. Or, less allegorically, Nart’s proof is far from convincing. As Kojève was helping build the framework for the Common Market, he would have every reason to establish a backchannel to the Soviets. Stepping back from the narrow image of Kojève Nart presents, we might consider the mores of French ministries that enacted long term policies that were often indifferent to the political figures heading the governments, a sort of background hum of the machinery keeping it all going. Constantine Melnik, a counter-intelligence expert who has worked at Rand, has already pointed out before in the matter of previous of Nart’s “revelations” – for instance, that Charles Hernu, the Minister of Defense under Mitterand, was a Soviet agent – that this reading of files from Secret Police agencies in Communist countries should not be accorded a blind trust. There is all the difference in the world between between having a backchannel relationship with the Soviets – or with the Americans - and spying. Using Nart’s method, one could as well say that Henry Kissinger, the emblematic back-channel man, was a Soviet spy. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Yet Nart’s story is not the first time Kojève’s loyalties have been suspected. This is the White Russian who proclaimed that Stalin was the philosopher-king, the end of history, in the Popular Front Paris of the 30s. He was a man who had a talent for both entrancing and mystifying, and an audience that went out and changed French intellectual culture in the 50s and 60s. He was, as it were, a back-channel philosopher. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">It would be nice to have an English language biography of Kojève. I thought I’d found one when I picked up Jeff Love’s The Black Circle: a Life of Alexandre Kojève (Columbia University Press, 2018), but it turned out that the sub-title belonged to a book in some other parallel universe, for this book is as little like a life of Kojève as a donut is like a spare tire. Love, a professor of German and Russian literature at Clemson, is after the life of the mind, not the intrigue of the exile. Love has given us a reading of Kojève that is now fascinating, now plodding, now insightful – especially about the last sections of Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, which have mostly not been translated into English – and too often lengthy paraphrase. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">An American might not be tempted to read the book at all. In France, at least, Kojève is a second level intellectual celebrity: but in the United States, it has been his fate to owe his fame, what there is of it, to the Straussians, who are ideologically his opposites. One of them, Francis Fukuyama, referenced him directly in his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This prompted the NYT reviewer of Fukuyama’s book, the historian William H. McNeill, to confess that the name was utterly unknown to him. But Americans who are concerned with the broader intellectual culture of the 20th century should really know their Kojève. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Alexandre Kojève was born in Russia, to a wealthy family of bankers and merchants. His cousin was the painter Kandinsky. When the Revolution came, much of that wealth disappeared. Kojève, who was merely a teen in 1918, got into the trouble with the Bolsheviks for operating on the black market in 1920. He was released from prison due to pull – that handy cousin of his, Kandinsky, was working with the Soviets at the time - and fled to Germany in 1921. There he studied philosophy and wrote a dissertation on the Russian philosopher and mystic, Soloviev. He met fellow exile Alexandre Koyre through a circumstance that usually would produce lifelong enmity: Kojève seduced Koyre’s sister-in-law, and Koyre went to talk him out of continuing the affair. In a story that adds lustre to the Kojève legend, Koyre was bowled over by the brilliance of the scoundrel he had made an appointment to meet. It was Koyre who helped Kojève get the gig giving lectures about Hegel at the École pratique des hautes études, then located in apparently cavernous quarters at the Sorbonne. Among Kojève’s colleagues were Marcel Mauss, the great anthropologist, and Emile Beneviste, the great linguist. Kojève was only 31 years old. But of the lectures that were given in 1933, it was Kojève’s that made him a star – although an underground star. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Hegel was not a well known figure in France at this time. Rather, he was considered to be most important for influencing the French positivist philosopher Victor Cousins. His chief works – the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic – had not even been completely translated into French. It was Kojève who brought Hegel to France. His lectures were attended by Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Klossowski, and Raymond Aron, among others. Mimeographs of them were read by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. None of these people, it seems, had read Hegel in German (save perhaps Aron). Kojève claimed, later, that he did not prepare his lectures in advance, but that he would typically come in, translate a passage of Hegel, and see where the passage led him. We will come back later to the soundness or lack thereof of this method. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">In 1979, Vincent Descombes, in his survey of contemporary French philosophy, wrote that Hegel became a touchstone both for the existentialist generation (who were for) and for the structuralist and post-structuralist generation (who were against). In both cases, Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel and his philosophical anthropology had a long lasting and major effect. Not that Descombes is praising the man: writing during the time when France was taking a neo-liberal and anti-Marxist term, Descombes claimed that Kojève had a “terrorist conception of history”. There is some truth to this: after all, in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, it is clear that Kojève finds a bond of blood between the Hegel who heard the cannons roaring at the battle of Jena and the Napoleon who won that battle. Making serious history, in Kojève’s opinion, was a matter of bloodshed, and the philosopher king would not be afraid of spilling buckets of the stuff.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">This is where the Straussians come in, for they, too, have ideas about history and its closure. Kojève translated a book of Leo Strauss’s on tyranny, and wrote an essay about it, to which Strauss replied. Strauss’s disciple, Allan Bloom, wrote the introduction to the partial English translation of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, in which he claimed that Kojève’s book was one of the few great philosophy texts of the twentieth century. The Straussians substitute a knowledgeable elite for the tyrant. It is all about soft power and esoteric writing, and small seminars about the Great Books. Love’s book probably requires some knowledge of this background, if only to appreciate the novelty of his approach. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Love is concerned with three things: first, to bring out more clearly the Russian background of Kojève’s philosophy.Second, to give a closer reading of the notorious theme of the “end of history”, bringing into play the rather enigmatic sections of the Introduction devoted to the Sage and the Book; and finally, to ask about the status of finality today – or, more generally, why does our current cultural moment lack a “sense of an ending”?</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Love’s knowledge of the Russian intellectual climate that impinged on Kojève in his formative years is helpful. Following in the footsteps of Boris Groys, he brings to the fore Vladimir Soloviev, the Russian mystic, who hypothesized an end of history that would be a compact of universal love among divinized humans, Godmen. But he also brings into focus another Russian thinker Nicolai Fedorov, who proposed that humanity’s purpose was, literally, resurrection, or the overcoming of death; and finally Dostoevsky, who through the Underground Man makes a strong and emblematic claim for the partial against the whole, the toothache against the Eureka moment, the man against the godman; and who displays, in the ideas and fate of Kirillov in The Possessed, the logical outcome of making the apocalypse one’s personal destiny – Kirillov has proven by argument that he,as the superior man, must commit suicide. These varieties of self-annihilation put Kojève’s own case, via Hegel, for the death of man in context. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Love wrestles with how much we should consider Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel a real commentary on Hegel and how much we should take it as Kojève projecting on Hegel his own philosophical conclusions. In the latter case, all of the Russian writers Love deals with are of paramount important. Still, it is curious that the strong 19th century tradition of Hegel commentary is left to the side. In particular, I wondered whether Kojève should not be juxtaposed with Herzen, who of all the Russian thinkers seems to be the one who learned the most from Hegel, while ultimately rejecting any schema that inserted logical necessity into history. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Reading the Introduction, one sometimes feels that Hegel is being victimized as much as he is being explained. Like John Slade, the American poet in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, whose autobiographical poem is absorbed in his commentor’s own autobiographic obsessions, Hegel is read in a way that wrenches out of certain of his 1806 concepts – for instance, the concept of Science, or Wissenschaft – products of Kojève’s own 1936 theories – most importantly, in the emblematic figure of the Sage, the self-annihilating last man, and the Book, the zombie-like totality that comes after man. Love’s comparison of Kojève and Heidegger is a good one: both were creators of a new genre of reading, founded on the notion of a sort of readerly violence. The text, here, is much like a musical score, which a musician of genius makes her own by a subtle and systematic recasting of its cues, its tone, its emphases, its essential rhythm. Kojève set the example for the reading practices of Deleuze and Derrida – in fact, Derrida’s famous defense of this kind of reading in his essay on Nietzsche, where Derrida asks about the force and origin of a certain decorum in interpretation that distributes certain texts for interpretation under certain genres, is very pertinent to, even inspired by, the way Kojève, before an audience that was generally ignorant of the Phenomenology, would shore up his interpretations by, as it were, scanning Hegel’s corpus for favoring pointers. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">And yet, it is fair to note that Hegel, like Kojève, was notoriously quick with the ‘off’ button – as for instance Hegel’s idea, expressed in his lectures on Aesthetics, that art was now “over”. That whole areas of intellectual practice can be pronounced “over” creates a certain competition among mandarins that we have witnessed in our own day, where the ‘off’ button is insistently clicked on everything from history to sit-coms. That the off button doesn’t, in the end, turn these things off, leads of course to another channel changer, where everything is “post”. It is an oddly provincial way of doing history, perhaps more forgivable in a figure who actually witnessed the collapse of a whole social order than in thinkers who are witnessing the radical expansion of our intellectual horizons as Eurocentrism loses its grip. Love’s most interesting chapters, to me, were about Kojève’s less studied latter lectures, in which the figure of the Sage and the Book figure the end of “man”. I’d recommend Love’s chapter 6, “the book of the dead”, and chapter 9, which takes up the decline in the prestige of teleological explanations, in particular. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Kojève’s notion that the Book would replace man seems, perhaps, less curious now, when we discuss the same event in terms of the book’s successor, Artificial Intelligence. However, Kojève’s claim that meaning requires finality is a more puzzling feature of his work than, I think, Love makes out. Kojève was well acquainted with the physics and mathematics of his time. He surely knew of, at least, Gödel’s work. The incompleteness theorem was published in 1931, two years before the start of the lectures. Surely in Love’s discussion of the decline of a “sense of ending” in contemporary thought, the incompleteness theory deserves a place, since it seems to aim at the heart of making a Book into a set in which it is itself a member. It would seem, via Gödel, that Kojève’s entire project was doomed to failure. We know how Wittgenstein resisted Gödel, even as, posthumously, Wittgenstein’s writings have been drawn into the circle of pragmatism that accepts incompleteness as the (non)final word. It is perhaps one of the costs of Love’s concentration on the eschatological project and its Russian roots casts some light on the self-annihilation of man, but it casts into the shade a very important part of Kojève’s thought as it explored the intersection of philosophy and science, a field that was dominated by his colleague Koyre. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Love starts his book with an observation that seems at least arguable: </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“Kojève’s insistence on finality and repetition is untimely. It reveals the way in which Kojève’s thought is deeply hostile to the governing dogma of our time, a dogma anticipated trenchantly by Dostoevsky’s underground man: that freedom is continuous striving without limits; that, in a pregnant phrase, error is freedom. The praise of error or errancy is everywhere in evidence; it is virtually the rallying cry of modern emancipatory French philosophy, with several notable exceptions, largely from the Marxist camp. The truth as truth has become tyrannical, terrifying. One seeks “infinite play,” polysemy, différance, the free creation of concepts, or various kinds of transgression that satisfy our demand for freedom from hegemonic narratives. Finality is to be rejected in favor of lasting openness, nonfinality, a horizon of possibility that beckons, seduces us to what might be rather than what must be.”</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">I see a different ideological dominant than Love does: a period in which the neo-liberal dictum, “there is no alternative”, continues to restrain our politics and our imagination. It has been a long time since the graffiti that lit up the walls of the 1968 Paris revolt had a hold on the public imagination – or the philosophical one. The end of hegemonic narratives, proclaimed in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, responded to the end of one hegemonic narrative: the orthodox Marxist version of history. One could argue that what Kojève called “history” was identical with the long Cold War that pitted the left against the right in Europe, beginning in the French Revolution, and that reached a certain point of exhaustion in the 80s. However, the ordinary economic realities on the ground, the structures of exploitation and profit, are still basically of the same form. Until capitalism goes, the fortune of the sides in the battle of Jena is still uncertain.</div></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-48181105352911155602024-03-17T19:09:00.001+01:002024-03-17T19:09:04.571+01:00The Great American Novel - a poem by Karen Chamisso<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">1.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The black out man, the white out man<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All the muses of the Company<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Busy<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Forgetting the nation’s memory<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In our hidy holes, we eat the reports:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">who was who and who was where<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When the torturer took the stair<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To the top of the tower with the cash in his<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pocket<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And assassinated the president<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(name redacted) of the country<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(name blacked out).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This, too, is happening .<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Oh oblivion my darling<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Principle Researcher: (name blacked out)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“he also prepared a paper on the magician’s art<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and the covert communication of information (mind-reading).”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">2.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When your electronic veils all come undone<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and nobody’s left for your kinda fun<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">take a (redacted) pill in the noonday sun<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">your mind to stun. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">3.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk—where before I felt a
defiance only”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He sez, speaking for me, me, me<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Though I look like a million bucks today<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And have the coat to prove it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I put my calmness in a cute little Benz and drove it over<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The bones over the bones of the road<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Built on an old Indian hunting trail:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As per Uncle Dunny’s table conversation. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The liquor laden car he was driving <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Plunged from the road” - and into the gnatter<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">of insect splatter<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">on the windshield of our family memory.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">4.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I was born too late to be a poet who writes “all”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And means it through sermon and circumstance<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Until I’m mummified among grasshopper and vine<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">- My all’s a smaller thing, all mine<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and has its America, its hurricane glass<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Its anecdotes of life in 1999.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It thinks that driving across the country will be <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">An exercise in all-creating liberty<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">signed and sealed by polaroid<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">like Ed Ruschka’s or Warhol’s<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">of the whiteline insignificant that haunts<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">every all with its tics and taunts. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My all is out of whack today<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My all has drizzled quite away<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My all is in drops and droops its head<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My all is the lights out of the dead.<o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-90573347183654299042024-03-13T11:21:00.001+01:002024-03-13T11:21:26.718+01:00On Kissing<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">
Daniel Harris’s “The Romantic”, from 1999, made the surprising argument – or
rather, exhibited the surprising implication – that the Production Code, the
Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the
beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded
a device that pornographers now generally use. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“During the
heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much
as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose
duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors'
mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French
kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of
unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with
the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels,
raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws,
full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the
winds, abandoned her shallow pretence of enraged resistance, and succumbed
wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. … The stiff choreography of this
asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the
misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is
constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains
yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by
indiscreet maids.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I am not
sure I find the “desperate groping” and the “clawing fingers” of the beringed
femmes fatales as joyless as does Harris. Desperation and joy are not enemies.
But I like it that Harris throws himself into a matter that has long fascinated
anthropologists: the culture and cult of the kiss. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">An Italian
semiotician, Marcel Danesi, in his History of the Kiss! (the exclamation mark
strangely kissing the sober title, in effect raking its back with clawing
fingers), makes the immodest claim that kissing today is an artifact of the
literature of the middle ages. Or, perhaps, the literature of the middle ages,
like a seismograph, recorded the surge of kissing as the patriarchal household,
where women were the chattel that sealed alliances, started to collapse. Along
the way he gives us such fascinating facts as this: that there is a science of
kissing and it is called philematology. This is crossword puzzle knowledge
gold. Plus, now, when I am asked what I do for a living, I will reply,
serenely, philematologist, and give the questioner a daredevil look while I
glide away like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
actuality, to return to the subject of desperate kisses, the Legion of Decency
permitted only three seconds. I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate
groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” Was
Hitchcock breaking the rule? But there is something to Harris’s vision in the
kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in
Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the
three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a
group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see
them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight
between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband,
which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t
take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit
longings indeed, with the camera lingering on Rita’s lovely unkissed lips. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Even if I
don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of
romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration
of a kiss. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Hollywood
kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to
approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close
range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the
conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretence of solitude, of
barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of
gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in
presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette
against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their
bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous
face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes
brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed
by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their
actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of
penetration alone.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFrzlqbiax4aDkhwP-8hiH7yDnTZ10lWqb6N8e42yBUOJj1d44mE51WroKPBa6IUu1Ri1h9bb98DwMsMf7ixkUBAWSGMpW_6Xrp74-LbbFi5gmw9PM8xHS7FiWnLv79H7sB-Vuk6WQ29rU2Ls1piHb5MLVJfIBcqHYNd8ViVa52XZr-N0g58am_w/s549/aa-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="549" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFrzlqbiax4aDkhwP-8hiH7yDnTZ10lWqb6N8e42yBUOJj1d44mE51WroKPBa6IUu1Ri1h9bb98DwMsMf7ixkUBAWSGMpW_6Xrp74-LbbFi5gmw9PM8xHS7FiWnLv79H7sB-Vuk6WQ29rU2Ls1piHb5MLVJfIBcqHYNd8ViVa52XZr-N0g58am_w/s320/aa-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Harris has,
I think, definitely read his Robert Coover. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ah, the
cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Bataille’s insight, which
was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its
interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the
perversions it spends its times blotting out. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">However,
Harris’s promising start on the kiss as spectacle devolves into a romantic view
of realism that seems to me to have no historical basis whatsoever:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“The
exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking,
morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and
films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing
directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional
representations are drifting further apart.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">They seem
to have been drifting apart since Moses was a pup. In fact, of course, this
account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of
narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated
animal – with their “daily experiences” curiously trashes the idea of the
imagination. The aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties –
encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity
that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused
of being childish and non-productive. At a same time, a response to this notion
of authenticity formed, under the slogan: eat the document. Thus mixing our
sensual and ideological categories. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But let us
not kiss off the kiss like this. Danesi quotes the evidence that is often used
to claim that there is something unique about the Western cult of the kiss. For
instance: Sheril Kirshenbaum writes: “In the Vedic texts no word exists for
‘kiss,’ but the same word is employed to mean both ‘sniff ’ and ‘smell,’ and
also has connotations of touch.” I find the deduction from the lack of a word a
little suspicious, since a “word” is not the only designator of a “thing”. A
phrase can obviously have the same weight as a word. In the Kama Sutra, there
is a chapter on kissing that is much more extensive than any comparable text in
the West. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“The text
goes on to describe four methods of kissing—moderate, contracted,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">pressed,
and soft—and lays out three kinds of kisses by a young girl or virgin: nominal
kiss (the girl touches lips with her lover but does not herself do anything),
throbbing kiss (the girl, setting aside her bashfulness a little, responds with
her lower but<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">not upper
lip), touching kiss (the girl touches her lover’s lips with her tongue, closes
her eyes, and lays her hands on her lover’s hands).”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is not
the letter of the Code, but it is the spirit – directives that choreograph
kissing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Danensi
quotes enough evidence from the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans to cast doubt
on his thesis. But I find the thesis interesting anyway: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Because
the kiss originated as a need to subvert the extant religious and patriarchal
order in medieval Europe, it acquired great appeal wherever it was introduced
through narratives, poetry, and visual art.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Although
this might be overstating the case, the idea that our set of romantic behaviors
is transmitted through narratives, poetry and visual art has a lot of appeal
for me, getting us outside the notion that “experience” and these aesthetic
forms can be usefully reified as antitheses. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is, I
think, where the moment of realism comes in. Contra Harris, the ideology of
realism is always a matter of showing that daily experiences are always
drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about
ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative
about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of
Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the
narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand.
Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the
artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical
economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s
theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for
existence – accumulation. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Still,
outside of this detour through my pet peeves (and the image of art and
experience as kissers caught in the moment of separation, lips coming off of
lips), I have to give kudos to Harris for seeing that the cut and edit of the
kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema could accidentally give rise to to the
loops of porno films: which, although seemingly all about unending coupling
are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss. Once one begins
mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes
another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses
roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis
for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a
basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance,
Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and
Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">How this
influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question I
leave to all of you philematologists out there.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-24996180425327116512024-03-12T11:31:00.004+01:002024-03-12T11:31:38.971+01:00The high modernist zen masters<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">There’s an
anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love, since it
shows Joyce to be a master Jesuit after all:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“… one day
he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond Jaloux, at a restaurant in
the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who
happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the
faultlessness of its style and language. </span><span lang="FR" style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Joyce, in
spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, 'Pas si bien que ca. II
commence avec une faute.' </span><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">And taking the book he showed them that in the
first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de
Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be
enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed
through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the
last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,' 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, ilss
la portaient alternativement.' 'Alternativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since
there are three bearers.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Oh that
High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent. What Joyce does to Flaubert here is
what Flaubert, in his letters, did to Balzac – he trumps the master.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Masters.
Zen masters, really. Who could hear the sound of one hand, clapping. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The
implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. A word
Robert Musil liked too. Soul and precision. It is like a sailing ship, where
every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every other plank to resist
the elements.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Yet put
this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated
by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the
mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related
to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Of course,
Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses as the cracked looking glass of a serving
girl. The crack is not simply a matter of distortion, but a reminder that the
mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t really model what is happening in writing.
Writing has parts and dimensions – words and sentences and paragrahs and
chapters, among the parts, and denotation, sound, connotation and history,
among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that I
recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what
is going on, the surface breaks up. Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter
in alternativement. It was the kind of second hearing that Flaubert had, too.
But for the novel to work, one hand must clap, I think. Impossible to the
secular ear, but not to the ear inside the ear. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Still: the
ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here, although
it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. But that resistance
must not be so great that it doesn’t move. Joyce might correct Flaubert’s
French, but recognizes that these corrections grow out of the spirit of
Flaubert’s scruples.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">But I don’t
want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my
favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Here, too, the story
becomes an image for a view of language and its effects:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“Le
vaisseau Argo ~ The ship Argo<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">A frequent
image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the
Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship,
without having to alter either its name or its form. This ship Argo is highly
useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not
by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions
(which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitu-<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">tion (one
part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way
linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one
and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no
other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Argo is,
ultimately, a variable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">I think
Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t think he would
have quite agreed with it. Make Argo too much of a variable and you will forget
what you are doing with it: going to find the very specific Golden Fleece. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">And yet,
couldn’t one say that the infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to
Barthes conclusion? There, in a dream language precision driven crazy by the
latin roots of alternitivement, movement is always back to where movement
started.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-70162068681743795042024-03-11T11:25:00.003+01:002024-03-11T11:25:47.525+01:00Untitled - Karen Chamisso<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">In the deadpan of poetry<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Like any other mutant in the American grain<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But let it all sink to the bottom. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bottom’s up! Such is the burden of the song.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And sometimes this can go on all night long<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When the pills don’t kick in and the street noise interferes<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With the dreams that are buzzing around my ears. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-32097658631231485372024-03-10T11:46:00.008+01:002024-03-10T21:08:07.236+01:00Horror: genre and politics<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO1r5DZIR1zixNvHeSatizFlo1uKN2dKVQmJon7T3Nxr71oQtXKnmNAFWMNqfh01hvEDWe-f9NfUpyxsbeJSBYdb7hexUMe9M3Eb2wr0KkEGkuBKWS-VUQwzwdSs3cTzAK61HLDPAVVxPWH7CtWYD82brSH-xWfZzS7QfveqNq1_sRYzhcQLNEmw/s562/francisco-goya-los-desastres-de-la-guerra-(set-of-80).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="562" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO1r5DZIR1zixNvHeSatizFlo1uKN2dKVQmJon7T3Nxr71oQtXKnmNAFWMNqfh01hvEDWe-f9NfUpyxsbeJSBYdb7hexUMe9M3Eb2wr0KkEGkuBKWS-VUQwzwdSs3cTzAK61HLDPAVVxPWH7CtWYD82brSH-xWfZzS7QfveqNq1_sRYzhcQLNEmw/s320/francisco-goya-los-desastres-de-la-guerra-(set-of-80).jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English
photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye
of an ox some hours after its death. Examining that assay with a microscope, he
distinctly perceived on the retina the lines of the paving stones of the
slaughterhouse, the last object that had affected the vision of the animal,
bowing its head to receive the blow of the butcher’s knife.” – Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Since the Revolution, terror has had a leftward aspect. The
Right (for instance, Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre) had a strong
consciousness of the sublimity of putting the royals on the chopping block, as
well as dissolving the very names of the nobility. Terror and shock, in various
guises and platforms, was long the effect sought by anarchist and socialist. A
healthy shock to the system, for the union leader, and for the poet, an
amassing of dynamite underground. The poet-anarchist Laurent Tailhade produced
a famous slogan at the time of the bombings in Paris in the 1890s: “Qu'importent
les victimes, si le geste est beau!». In due time, those numb to beautiful
gestures like to recall, Tailhade himself lost an eye to one of the bombs. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The working class culture of anarchy seems to have died,
although its memorials are lovingly preserved on many sites on the internet –
see, for example, the Maitron site (<a href="https://maitron.fr/">https://maitron.fr/</a>).
Where once we sympathized with the terrorist, we now – we the entertained –
turn to horror for our sublime. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is usually an intro to some meditation on horror as the
defining effect of various fictions. My own sense of things is that horror as a
genre can’t be understood without understanding horror in fact, from urban
murders to concentration camps, that span the “modern period.” Foucault’s
description of the drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, which of
course happened in a public space and was meant as punishment and spectacle, could easily be fitted in an anthology of horror. Even at this time, though, there were enlightenment philosophers that were
doubtful of it as punishment but, as well, as spectacle. Napoleon, famously,
banished abattoirs to the extremities of Paris because he did not like the
populace being dulled to the spectacle of execution – given the populace’s
actions during the Revolution. Yet as the spectacle of execution was confined
more and more to state enforced restricted areas, printed media was invested in
the grotesque and the horrid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">A lot of the literature on horror is devoted to horror as a
genre. It is a genre, but what happens when the genre wall comes down is that
one misses the capillary connection between the genre and the world outside the
genre. Literature – and film and song and painting – are in the street and in
the newspapers and the laboratories. Horror as a genre is stylistically marked,
so often, by upfronting the capillary source. Poe, for instance, used mesmerism
a lot, which made perfect sense in his struggle with the transcendentalist
culture of New England. In England, de Quincey’s The art of murder was not just
the beginning of modern true crime, but was a way of writing horror that fed on
the Newgate tradition of reported crime. Poe’s followers in France picked up on
the peculiarly capillary adaptedness of horror. When, in Villiers de
L’isle-Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir, the narrator, a horrid savant named
Tribulet Bonhomet describes himself as a “Saturnian of the second epoque”,
which, as the Pleiade editors have pointed out, is a direct lift from a manual
on handreading, Les mystères de la main révélés et expliqués, by Adolph
Desbarrolles, which is still in print today. When, more currently, Stranger
Things looks for its jump scare, it attaches to the very real MKULTRA program
of the CIA, which supposedly ended in the late 60s – but actually just changed
its name. To my mind, one of the great resources of genre is this capillarity.
It is why it often feels more current, more plugged in, than the mainstream
literature forms. The modernist device was to embrace that capillarity – which you
see in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ullyses, Mrs. Dalloway, etc. The Lyric
Realist homing in on the upper middle suburban or urban household is as wary of
this inlet from the outside as the upper middle class burger is of crime. </span><o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-47139995463300676812024-03-08T16:07:00.001+01:002024-03-08T16:07:08.584+01:00Social utility of fat cats<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-outline-level: 1; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Social utility of fat cats: the
use and limits of wealth<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-outline-level: 1; vertical-align: baseline;"><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSY5HZBh9_7P9hsJyBtUXMW50zWsVATFT40i5ZlK2jo0HNiQtEGbzq9K8oTR5CJeelCIi6Bv6-mssUcXwEXhLQ2PSsMYqOR7KDJdR7dyjyItrKaO-G4yyXBGB4Uh5e99D7gYi5FALxwrj9uK-WwT7Kd1wT_yOZkMbsUY_qDvjvuTsCT0gQC9MYMg/s2576/blindfold.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2576" data-original-width="1932" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSY5HZBh9_7P9hsJyBtUXMW50zWsVATFT40i5ZlK2jo0HNiQtEGbzq9K8oTR5CJeelCIi6Bv6-mssUcXwEXhLQ2PSsMYqOR7KDJdR7dyjyItrKaO-G4yyXBGB4Uh5e99D7gYi5FALxwrj9uK-WwT7Kd1wT_yOZkMbsUY_qDvjvuTsCT0gQC9MYMg/s320/blindfold.jpg" width="240" /></a></b></div><b><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><br /></span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-outline-level: 1; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">We need to discuss the social function of rich
people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, and the rare
inventor, I see two functions: administration and investment.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The social cost of administration has gone up
considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar
pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth
of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting
corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation
in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s.
The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that
neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an institutional
addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance
with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its
presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business
school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane
compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with
“aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous
principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the
leader. The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare
the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to
Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return
on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock
options.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">One must keep in mind, from a political point of
view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in
Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient
condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The
gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker
in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason
for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked
like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The
normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to
take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich
upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of
targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out
of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new
strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If
corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could
perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at
think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the
eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists,
who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert
power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable
trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at
the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents
and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous
college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was
no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t
matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source
of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from
administration as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book
Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200421170225/http:/%20http/bostonreview.net/books-ideas/mike-konczal-thomas-piketty-capital-studyng-rich"><b><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #e64946; font-family: "inherit",serif; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">Mike Konczal’s excellent essay
in the Boston Review in 2014.</span></b></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to
administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median
worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t
happened. The very wealthy have seen their income growing by
about <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200421170225/https:/www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/piketty-saez-zucman-income-growth-inequality-stagnation-chart"><b><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #e64946; font-family: "inherit",serif; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">6 percent per year since the
seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973.</span></b></a> The
middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one
percent per year. The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have
seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends
from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having
less percentage gains than the middle.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The left argues that we have no reason to pay these
exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have
been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary,
they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just
reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of
expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one
can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our
greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but
allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out
on the street. And so on down the generations, </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: black; font-family: "inherit",serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Open Sans"; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none; padding: 0cm;">ad gloria mundi</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Along with administration, the wealthy play a
positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true,
circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them
richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that
credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit
to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great
capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons,
but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet
planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy
that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in
desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies
offered by technological progress.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of
financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that
is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient – or accepting
the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of
its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a
quick return – basically, the casinoization of the banking system – has only
been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very
wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and
everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and
the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a
story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx
told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America,
if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation
from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can
be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The
success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the
decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere
in the developed world save China.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The story made up by Schumpeter, and other
conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some
risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that
can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires
people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this
person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for
graciously making such wealth for others.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and
hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the
risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the
workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no
Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the
tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built
on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur
isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any
glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking
wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes
an actual company, his funders – those VC angels – in the majority of
cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the
“entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the
man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable
genius.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur
myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an
unnecessary premium to the administrator.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">But to return to the social function of the
wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see
the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however,
for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for
the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our
economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be
defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In
the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9
percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent
own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if
global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can
correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the
wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the
wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is
composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance,
and Real Estate sectors. These people have seen their incomes and wealth
grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one
percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy
much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a
major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who
can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be
pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no
country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we
refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the
Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not
accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the
world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is
decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that
there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one
can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million
dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present
system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop.
And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The
right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag,
but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating
a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-63855564273195045302024-03-07T10:54:00.005+01:002024-03-07T11:03:06.932+01:00wokeness - a political anthropology<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixiAredrFTH4o-7aGshnU7A4X8jqXRYenJyEw6Dh-OVCOoxlzH6MdIZdE4LkQ5oo9-M_Nva_7obAKGiE9leeOV3CnoHDkjSGKrswMxwImzz2J0xq-YEKCQHmh_H4AcH3QadhRLuj8fTCYXBVZhoKUsFG8apzGzKYP1-4Sg_Mog2cOIdGyQFJloCw/s1400/TELEGRAPH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="969" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixiAredrFTH4o-7aGshnU7A4X8jqXRYenJyEw6Dh-OVCOoxlzH6MdIZdE4LkQ5oo9-M_Nva_7obAKGiE9leeOV3CnoHDkjSGKrswMxwImzz2J0xq-YEKCQHmh_H4AcH3QadhRLuj8fTCYXBVZhoKUsFG8apzGzKYP1-4Sg_Mog2cOIdGyQFJloCw/s320/TELEGRAPH.jpg" width="221" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I had one of those discussions last night in which the word “wokeness”
wandered around like an uninvited guest at a birthday party. “Wokeness”, at this moment in France, as a demonized thing that the Zemmourist
right has decided is their ticket to ride. But for me, mostly, it is a fashionable
phrase that will disappear in due course. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But then, as I was falling asleep, I had an odd thought:
what if I’m… wrong?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">1.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I grew up in a world in which the terms of political anthropology
were clear: there was the left, and there was the right. One could draw a
primitive graph showing American liberals a degree to the left and American
conservatives a degree to the right, and that seemed to correspond to what we
understood to be the stakes, which was about the working class and its
consciousness and the owning class and its consciousness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">2.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Class has by no means disappeared, but consciousness has
shifted, and with it the terms of our political anthropology. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I like to think of neoliberalism as a general term for a
certain culture, and not just a certain political economic arrangement in the
age of globalized capitalism. As a culture, it does work against the old
solidarities by emphasizing the (false) dualism between the state and “private
enterprise”. To put my cards on the table, I don’t at all buy this picture. The
real question of governance is about alliances between something called the
state and other entities, like multinational corporations. The upper echelon of
both is on the same side, aiming for the same ends. However, putting this to
one side, under neoliberalism the self is contoured more by the ecology of “private
enterprise” than by the “state”. For example, Ferguson Missouri, which was
subject to a massive study by the justice department, is a city where the
police force, from outside, plays a massive role in controlling the mostly
black population, but that population is almost completely plugged into
businesses, small and large. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">However, the political economy here is a culture in as much
as this contouring of lives occurs in the absence of old solidarities – like an
organized working class – and in the presence of a hyper-sensitive and
sensational culture – a culture of affects. And this too is neoliberalism.
Under neoliberalism, the old successes of the civil rights movements of the
late twentieth century are as important to the neo-liberal self-consciousness as
“private enterprise”. Neo-liberalism is a synthesis of these two things. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thus, when a neoliberal exults in breaking the glass ceiling
(like Hillary Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg), this is not some cynical ploy, but
the neoliberal culture in action. To my eye, feminism is about breaking the
patriarchy, of which the corporation and the state are products – and thus,
putting women in the CEO position is precisely as liberatory as replacing the
guards in a prison with “screws” among the prisoners. Still a prison, my droogs
and droogesses! But where I see putting a human face on an oppressive system,
the neoliberal feminist sees my objection as a male reaction to female power. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">3.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">However, wokeness is proving to be as irritating to the
neoliberal feminist as it is to the standard issue suit. Which says something
about the position vacated by the decline of the left. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The shift towards individualism of a purely formal type has
been followed by a shift towards living individualism. The individual lives, it
turns out, and doesn’t just consume. Living involves memory. It involves the
passions. It involves affect. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The “affect” effect, from the old Left point of view, is
hokum. I think it isn’t, but I also think this kneejerk reaction has to do with
the fraught history of affect discourse. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The old program of taking power from the capitalist and giving
it to the producers has been dogged, on the right, with a long discourse about “envy”.
It was fought against as not just bad for the economy, as conceived by the
economist, but also as a bad feeling, akin to the sins of the pre-French
Revolutionary days. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In fact, the program of the right, since the Revolution, is
keenly attuned to the culture of feeling. In an ordered society, that culture
produces the right feelings – in a disordered society, one for instance in
which the producer somehow ends up in the governor’s seat, it produces hate and
envy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">As it turns out, however, when capitalism triumphs, globally,
the discourse of affect is retranscribed. What results is that the old
rightwing position, which relied on a monopoly of guilt, is shaken, and the woke
position as it were seizes the right to make guilty. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">4.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I am<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>not happy about
the current state of our political anthropology, but I do take it as a given. My
hope is that wokeness is a necessary but insufficient condition for the making
of a better, juster, and even happier world. That is the world I, wee little
pea that I am, think is not only possible, but necessary if we are to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>survive the catastrophes we have visited upon
ourselves. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><br /></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-23261322830461772712024-03-04T08:51:00.004+01:002024-03-04T08:51:47.434+01:00Open and Closed<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "inherit", serif; font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Among the
chief ornaments of the romance of philosophy is the high place accorded to the
open, or to openness. Open the understanding or the mind or the eye, openness
as a state of being – these are all on the plus side of the ledger. Heidegger,
of course, is the great poet of openness in this tradition, charging openness
with a numinous relationship to being that you can take or leave – but he is
only building on a vast previous structure. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Closing,
perhaps as a consequence, is never given high marks by philosophers. Closing
one’s eyes or one’s understanding is, automatically, a bad thing. Even in
building an argument, to come to a conclusion – a close – is often transformed,
in the text, into opening up. After the Absolute spirit has tied itself in
knots and done more tricks than Houdini, he at last is in a good place at the
end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. You would think that the absolute spirit
would be able to close up shop and go fishing. But no! He has to open up once
again and go, in recollection, though the whole muddle again. No closing for
it!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The open
is, of course, closely aligned with liberty – in the philosophical sense. As
for the philosophical sense of the closed – well, this is often associated with
liberty’s end. Philosopher’s have spent surprisingly little time sussing out
all the meanings of the closed. There are no doors in Plato’s Dialogues, and
though, of course, the Greeks masked, there is no praise of hide and seek. The
closed, at best, is an occasion for the open. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The only
philosopher of note that has meditated on the closed is, I think, Bachelard. In
Poetics of Space, he presents a strong sense of the house as an enclosure
against the outside – and in particular against the oldest of seasons, winter.
In winter, the open becomes hostile, the enclosed comfortable – in fact, the
image of comfort. It is a comfort that belongs to the long lost age of huts and
forests filled with snow and wolves. If the open is always a Greek summer, the
closed is always a German winter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This rap on the open and the closed lacks, for some
reason, any reference to good old Georg Simmel (good old was his official title
I believe), who wrote an essay pre-dating Bachelard's great series of
phenomenologies and psychoanalyses: Bridge and Door.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Simmel also generated the prototypical Weimar style -
before Weimar existed - and impressed it upon the generation of Benjamin and
Kracauer. It begins with simplicities, and soon develops into an intricate
world of references and echoes that shadow every paragraph. It is a style of
knowingness that borders mysticism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, the Bridge and Door essay, published as a
feuilleton in a newspaper, proposes a way of looking at the outside as a unity
of both connections and divisions. Everything is separate, and everything
functions within a system. A bridge, for Simmel, is first an imaginative act, a
way of seeing a river not as one thing, but as a thing that divides one bank
from another. A primal image of division. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The connection that a bridge affords is contrasted with
the closure that a door affords.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">.... The door decisively represents that way dividing and
bind are only two sides of the same act. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The person who first constructed a hut reveals, just as
the first trailmaker, the specific human potential against nature, in as much
as this person, out of the continuity and endlessness of space cuts out a
parcel and shapes this into a particular unity in accordance with some meaning.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">... <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That the door is equally a functional link between the
space of the human and everything that is outside of this sets up the division
between the inner and the outer. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Exactly because it can also be opened, its closing gives
the feeling of a stronger exclusion against all the beyond of this space more
than a simply indivisible wall. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The latter is dumb, but the door speaks."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Daytona",sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The door speaks. This mix of the philosophical and the
lyrical is unbearable to a certain kind of common sense mind - a strong
tradition in England. But it is music to another kind of mind, who enjoys leaps
as well as the dull utilitarian tread of the deductive-hypothetical method.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-83979462118471788332024-03-01T10:54:00.003+01:002024-03-01T10:55:18.057+01:00the Flour massacre in Gaza<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: inherit;"> <br /><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/01/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news" target="_blank">The softfocus NYT coverage of the extermination of Gazans
continues. Israeli soldiers murdered at least a hundred starving Palestinians,
and this is the lede" "The deaths of scores of Palestinians in a
desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza..."</a><br /><br /><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">The
double talk, where Hamas terrorists mass murder Israelis and Palestinians
mysteriously die in desperate rushes for food administered by a kindly Israeli
government should make even the most hardened NYT subscriber question what is
going on.<br /></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">I
am sure that there must be a way to place the blame where it belongs: on those
Palestinians. Surely the Israeli soldiers were just playfully shooting bullets
to entertain the scum – er, the Palestinians who might even someday earn the
right to be human beings – but the ignorant and silly Palestinians kept trying
to catch the bullets! Meanwhile, a settler group began building a colony in
Northern Gaza. They were removed by Israeli soldiers who did not, for some
reason, lay down a covering fire while doing so. Those with memories that reach
back, oh, to last week will recognize the West Bank pattern. First, the
settlers are sternly warned that this is not legal, then they are told don’t
make too much noise, and then they are noisily defended by the Likud government
– while the U.S. watches approvingly. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <br /></span></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">Recently,
Vox published a bullet pointed list of all the things Trump did for Netanyahu’s
government – in order to assure us that Biden is a much better choice than
Trump. Then folks on blue sky noticed that every bullet point was continued by
the Biden government – except one, where the policy was changed last month.
Here’s what Trump did, according to Zach Beauchamp at Vox:<br /></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> <br /></o:p></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">Recognizing
Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria taken
during the 1967 Six-Day War.<br /></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">Shutting
off funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (which Biden almost
immediately restored and then temporarily suspended again amid a scandal about
its employees participating in October 7).<br /></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">Abandoning
the decades-old US position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a
peace agreement and eliminating longstanding restrictions on spending US
taxpayer dollars in them.<br /></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">Moving
the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the US mission to
Palestine in the same city.<br /> </span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> <br /></o:p></span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">So,
did Biden revoke recognition of the Golan Heights seizure, or punish Israel for
its West Bank policy, or move the American Embassy back to Tel Aviv? No, he did
not.<br /> </span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">There
is such a thing as a micro authoritarian regime. For instance, the regime that
controls discourse about Israel in most of the West. The point is to produce a
moral fatigue – to make the critics defend themselves from anti-semitism, even
as the leader of Israel gladly pals up with real antisemites, from the neo-Nazi
Bolsanaro to Orban to the Saudi royals to Trump. Moral fatigue is a great
cushion for these mini authoritarian regimes, but when the bubble bursts it is
not pretty – the constant conflating of Jews and Israel by the ultra-right in
Israel and elsewhere is given to us as a problem in gaslighting, but is
ultimately leveraging antisemitism in a horrific way.<br /> </span><span face=""Segoe UI", sans-serif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #42566c; font-size: 11.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 107%;">The
flour massacre yesterday was a crime that will soon go down the stream – to
paraphrase a Rolling Stone song – who wants yesterday’s victims? Nobody in the
world. </span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-22823005406022619842024-02-26T14:20:00.001+01:002024-02-26T14:20:19.240+01:00Gaza. Eight points<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;">A few comments about the Mass murder in the Gaza and its
apologists.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 1. </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span>Gaza is about 3/4ths the
size of the Dallas metro area. Israel's apologists keep harping on how Hamas is
making Gazans "human shields". This is like saying America makes
Americans "human shields" by planting post offices and military bases
in metro areas.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 2. </span></span></span>Every Hamas member is not a
soldier. And every hospital with Hamas personnel is not a "shield"
for Hamas. In Tel Aviv, the largest hospital, Sheba Medical Center, has a
military wing, RAM2. If Hamas bombed the SMC, I am perfectly sure the media
would be disinterested in RAM2.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 3. </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span>Hamas was sustained by the
Likud government for one reason: to divide Palestinians and prevent the
emergence of a Palestinian state. The evil fruit of that policy is there for us
to see: a discredited Palestinian authority on the West Bank, and a paramilitary
in Gaza.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 4. </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span>Hamas is now a wildly
popular party with Palestinians, since Hamas is the sole response to Israel's
exterminationist policy. The West has abetted Israel's illegal occupation of
the West bank and its long imposition of siegelike conditions on Gaza. Western
leaders think they'll get a pass on this.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 5. </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span>This is not going to be a
good year for the "center liberal". It is almost certain that, given
Israel's policy, another 30 thou at a minimum will die in Gaza. Will be
murdered in Gaza. Unlike the West's last fun starve em to death frolic in Yemen,
which was to please a huge force in international petroleum, Saudi Arabia,
Israel is a small unimportant economic nation, but a vastly important symbolic
nation. Its support in the West goes back, pretty clearly, to the German-European
mass murder of the Jews between 1939-1945. But by a cruel irony, the state
founded to “make up” for this mass murder, Israel, encoded the same noxious
ethnic nationalism in its constitution and actions. This was not unforeseeable –
Martin Buber warned about this all the way back in the 1920s. Alas, in the
shadow of the massive crime committed by the Nazis, a an uncriticizable nation
took on the appearances and spirit of the worst European models. Or, for that
matter, American models – the Wilsonian dream of the U.S. as a white Christian
republic is a mirror image of the Likud ideal.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 6. </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span>When the U.S. occupied
Iraq, no space whatsoever was givin in the "discourse" to the
obvious: that the occupying force was going to face an "insurgency."
Total surprise there - if you were a Bushite airhead. This obvious is similarly
hidden now - except Bidenite aireheads play the gimp role. The Middle East of
the dictatorships, with their investments in the West, are not going to hold
out as a bulwark against the people who watch the Palestinians be hunted,
starved and eliminated in short order, to a barrage of apologies that wouldn’t
fool a halfwit. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">7.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> 7. </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span>The nature of the
apologetic for Israel hasn’t changed in fifty years. It is that Israel is
uniquely picked on – look at all the resolutions against it at the U.N.! That proves
precisely the opposite point. If the son of the mayor of a town got a number of
tickets for speeding and illegal parking and simply tore them up, it would not
be evidence that he was picked on, but that he was privileged. Similarly, the
number of resolutions against Israel stands in stark contrast to the refusal to
punish Israel for actions other countries are embargoed for, or even face armed
suppression to arrest. Iraq had a much better claim to Kuwait than Israel has
to either the West Bank or East Jerusalem, but in the latter case, that of
Israel, the Western alliance has not fought for the Palestinians, nor enforced
an economic blockade on Israel, nor demanded arms inspections. Imagine if the
UN demanded Israel allow arms inspection of their nuclear capability. It wouldn’t
happen. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, Russia has a much
better case for "owning" Ukraine than Israel has for occupying East
Jerusalem. Israeli fans always bring up the U.N., and always miss the point.
From the p.o.v. of International Law, Israel is an outlaw nation. A nation,
like North Korea and Pakistan, that illegally acquired nuclear capability. But
the Israeli stans don't really care. For all the hokem about international law,
we are still in the 1910s, and the South is still a colonial possession with no
right to, well, any voice in things whatsoever. </span><o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-15839336853598737012024-02-24T20:35:00.001+01:002024-02-24T20:35:15.620+01:00witnesses<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoIlJtl5w8BebxUBzm_amfzt8QadB_VFe_1UqosGOefdKZiv7THQIKc3dRqKIQfPW5d-YxXD1aX3ymkgYJ-K4SmwKYRlDja-qz4WsoJeWnGqxr2Pwmt5kgyGZk_cWeKZAO_h5Fth00jqXmUdzkSuZ2J3gFIsRWhZ8qBtVGwndC_AIUpdwzbPswdg/s401/p45.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="401" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoIlJtl5w8BebxUBzm_amfzt8QadB_VFe_1UqosGOefdKZiv7THQIKc3dRqKIQfPW5d-YxXD1aX3ymkgYJ-K4SmwKYRlDja-qz4WsoJeWnGqxr2Pwmt5kgyGZk_cWeKZAO_h5Fth00jqXmUdzkSuZ2J3gFIsRWhZ8qBtVGwndC_AIUpdwzbPswdg/s320/p45.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Historians in search of a method in the early twentieth century adopted
a motto first: Cicero’s “Ne quid falsi audeat, ne quid veri non audeat
historia”- which has been translate in various ways, like "Let him dare to
say nothing false, nor fail to say anything true.” Unlike the study of, say,
horses, the human historian is dealing mostly with humans who are always saying
false things, and always believe, in one or another circumstance, false things,
and who often have reasonable suspicions about saying true things, either
because they are inconvenient and endangering, or because they invoke causes
that are either utterly opaque or utterly incredible. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Yesterday I, an inhabitant of Paris since 2010, went for the very first
time to visit Versailles. I went, I should say, in my first year in Paris to
Fontainebleau, and I have gone back many times. Similarly, I have visited many
of the famous Chateaux along the Loire. Versailles, however, spooked me. The
King it celebrates, Louis XIV, is on my list of evil rulers. I am, by nature, a
Fronde-ist, and that autocratic, bewigged harem keeper arouses an interior howl
of protest that touches all things Quatorzieme.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Nevertheless, visiting it with Adam and A., I was suitably bowled over.
After a while, though, the magnificence becomes rather sad. It is a palace that
few people, few kings and queens, could inhabit with any comfort. It seems so
utterly stripped of intimacy. Unlike Fontainebleau, there is no Renaissance
behind this profusion of painting and sculpture; the nymphs have departed,
replaced by grand effigies of nymphs.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Which is very unfair. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">However, the melancholy of the place really hit me in the “war” room,
which, with its paintings of Napoleon’s battles, of General Rochambeau at
Yorktown, etc., didn’t exist in the Roi Soleil’s time, or at least with these
paintings. What paintings! This vast wing is hung with paintings of battles
that are on canvases taller than I am and wider than a big sofa. All are of
battles won by the French. Hence, I believe, no Waterloo, no Sedan, no flight
from Paris as the Nazis advanced. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">A battle is an ontologically difficult thing – named usually for a place
where it iconically happens, even if it happens in reality in many places at
once. From the Bhagavad-Gita to The Charterhouse of Parma, the combatant and
the combat have formed an uneasy duo, a witness to the mystery of events. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Moving across the room, overshadowed by these towering scenes of
decorous slaughter and horseback glory, one longs for peace, for a much less
bloody kind of pastoral. To traverse that room is to become, briefly perhaps, a
pacifist.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">In 1929, a book was published by a French-American historian,
Jean-Norton Cru: Temoins – Witnesses. It provoked a scandal in France as
intense as Remarque’s novel provoked in Germany. It asked about the combatant’s
experience in histories that spoke about war from the point of view,
exclusively, of the commanders and politicians, of those outside the charnel
circle of combat. For Cru, the « Stendhal » paradox has been cruelly
misunderstood. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">When Fabrice del Dongo, a 17 year old idealist, “wanders through” the
battle of Waterloo without finding it, so to speak, the paradox has been
interpreted to mean that the combatant, the skin and bones and senses on the
field, is disqualified as a witness to the battle as a whole – we must leave
that to the commanders. Cru believed that Fabrice’s experience was, on the
contrary, with its fragmentation, gaps in information, and zigzags exactly the
battlefield experience history was failing to transmit:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“These questions, I asked them, like many another soldier without a
doubt, from the day when, in 1914, the contact, the brutal shock of formidable
realities of the the war reduced into bits my bookish conception of the acts
and sentiments of the soldier in combat, a historical conception that, naively,
I believed scientific. I then understood that I did not know war with a total
ignorance of its foundation, its truth, all that which is applicable to every
war, and that this ignorance brought in its train the ruin of all the opinions
from whence it was derived.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">In this moment, Cru believed – and in this he was, perhaps unwittingly,
a cousin to the modernist artists of his generation – that the problem was in
imposing a totality on the mass of voices and consciousnesses, rather than
letting that totality emerge from the mass of voices and consciousnesses. Just
as Dublin on June 14, 1904, was the emergent structure of its dreaming and
interior monologuing inhabitants, so too was World War 1 an emergent structure
that command and the state claimed and defined by inverting the order of
reality. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Cru’s equivalent to Fabrice del Dongo’s 18 June 1815 experience was
Verdun, where he was posted on Jan. 17, 1917. He was part of a squadron
relieving another squadron, which had been ordered to dig a trench. The trench,
the new squadron found, was undug. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“The poor guys had tried, but even though they have finished other work
in easier terrain, they couldn’t begin to penetrate this conglomerate of stones
and dirt, all frozen together, as compact as concrete. Remember the rigors of
that winter. On our arrival, the virtual trench was assigned to us and we were
told that the whatever it takes of the corps had been so energetic that the
work had been dubbed finished – in counting on warmer temperatures to permit
digging the trench. But the freeze persisted. »<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Thus, on the maps used by the generals, a trench existed because the
trench had been ordered. Against this was the reality of the territory facing
the men in Cru’s squadron, where the trench did not exist, and could not exist,
in spite of the squad’s efforts, due to temperature and terrain. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Who, here, was lost? The grunt or the commanders?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“Our division inherited firstly the miseries of those poor soldiers : in
the course of six days on the line, I lost my entire squadron, a quarter of the
men were killed or wounded, three quarters were evacuated due to frostbite.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Cru operationalizes a recognizably Cartesian dualism between the spirit
and the body, but turns the cognitive hierarchy upside down: it is the body
that knows, while the spirit loses itself in abstraction.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Historic"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Cru was not a Marxist. But he wrote a book that significantly altered
historiography, introduced the ways and means to write a history from the
bottom up. A modernist history, if you will, and one that will never be
plastered on the walls of wings of palaces.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Neue Haas Grotesk Text Pro",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-19095778315640160572024-02-22T12:14:00.000+01:002024-02-22T12:14:40.700+01:00Nemesis and the ultimate game<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTtmm17bltaBRzrYV149ac6emRfV-z_JiWzg9LdxFtRNKuurPUl1FS7OJYn3-IvLXxouqfVmxSf7E6FD0nXuhr7g0J_sgwDBgt5P_y1sAZEo_3AK9u_vsFJWFvV3Tz2xTlTPGqVHi5ZlF7VljO0CXpxmrLEV5MD8RWvZaLXpeEHdgCb662VBjpcg/s768/Nemesis_Napoli_Inv9051.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="668" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTtmm17bltaBRzrYV149ac6emRfV-z_JiWzg9LdxFtRNKuurPUl1FS7OJYn3-IvLXxouqfVmxSf7E6FD0nXuhr7g0J_sgwDBgt5P_y1sAZEo_3AK9u_vsFJWFvV3Tz2xTlTPGqVHi5ZlF7VljO0CXpxmrLEV5MD8RWvZaLXpeEHdgCb662VBjpcg/s320/Nemesis_Napoli_Inv9051.jpg" width="278" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-outline-level: 3;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-color-alt: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPvR7wNwRAo"><i><span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">Come on pretty boy</span></i><i><span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><br />
</span></i><i><span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">Can't you show
me nothing but surrender</span></i></a>”</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><br />
<br />
Economists call it the Ultimate Game. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-color-alt: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/06/031006ta_talk_surowiecki"><span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">James Surowiecki</span></a></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> gives
a good description of it:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the
proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty,
seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it
offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he
rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.<br />
<br />
The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever
it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this
rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently,
people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too
much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are
willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly,
even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><br />
<br />
<br />
The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among
other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate
Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess
Nemesis.<br />
<br />
It is curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis-Adrastea in 1787, two
years before the French Revolution (of which he was, at the beginning, an
ardent supporter – and continued, even after the Terror, to feel was a
necessary and ultimately good thing), at the very peak of the culture of
enlightened hedonism.<br />
<br />
Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double
goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt
to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis,
the fair goddess, mother of Helen.<br />
<br />
The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He
tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In
particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with
the unhappy than the happy”?<br />
<br />
“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not
jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with
another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the
more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a
pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet
repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness,
become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know
how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was
even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology
observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the
companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who
Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the
other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier
hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide]
or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of
judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it
also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of
virtue and truth.<br />
<br />
And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes
oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with
the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away
since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men
with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil
one.” [141]<br />
<br />
His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of
antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on
Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from
a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm
concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already
signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:<br />
<br />
“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the
80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the
beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and
art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of
his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents
that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his
appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his
style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the
point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to
necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate
words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after
his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling
through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and
Terminus.” (329)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The realistic
narratives of the great novelists of the 19<sup>th</sup> century are all
written under the sign of Nemesis, which is a mark of their insight into the myth
of realism – which floats within our uncertain emotional vocabularies. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Nemesis, I
feel sure, will outlast us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-47519443648077045002024-02-21T16:21:00.005+01:002024-02-21T23:52:59.932+01:00 Marianne Moore teaches Sunday School - Proverbs 9<p><span style="font-size: large;"> <span color="var(--primary-text)" style="font-family: inherit; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Marianne Moore teaches Sunday School</span></span></p><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="x1iorvi4 x1pi30zi x1swvt13 xjkvuk6" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id=":r6f:" style="font-family: inherit; padding: 4px 16px;"><div class="x78zum5 xdt5ytf xz62fqu x16ldp7u" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: -5px; margin-top: -5px;"><div class="xu06os2 x1ok221b" style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;"><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs x1xmvt09 x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" color="var(--primary-text)" dir="auto" style="display: block; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.3333; max-width: 100%; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: break-word;"><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Proverbs 9</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Stolen waters are sweet, and as for bread eaten in secret</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Well, don’t eat it, children, it will spoil your appetite.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>Wisdom is a woman I know well</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">And of the ball she is not the belle</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">But she will do for the famous occasions</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">where on the high towers she’ll don her hard hat.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">She’s not afraid to clamber onto the Wonder Wheel:</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">a “real thrill like you have probably never had before</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">—at least not at this great height!" </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">But to get back to sense and sentence</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">- Bobby and Betty don’t slouch like that</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">These chairs are made for backs straight as a baseball bat</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Which must be true in order to hit true</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">And drive home from third base the stranded runner.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">This phrase, here, is a lifelong lesson:</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">“the knowledge of the holy is understanding”</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Although understanding, notwithstanding</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Is sometimes itself hard to understand</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">But this you will find, as I have found, </span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Is sound.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">“If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself: </span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">but if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.”</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Both, notice, are solitudes. We all have that choice</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Wisdom or mockery, </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">But in either case you’ll be lacking company</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Essential company. Wisdom is a tough nut</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">and she doesn’t put icing on her adages</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">but tells you life comes without bandages. </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’d like to tell you that you should avoid</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">The foolish woman who sitteth at the door of her house</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">But I think some of you will become that dame</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">And others will marry her all the same.</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">And maybe we should ease up a bit on her</span></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">To make wisdom and mercy concur. </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">- Karen Chamisso</span></div></div></span></div></div></div></div></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="x168nmei x13lgxp2 x30kzoy x9jhf4c x6ikm8r x10wlt62" data-visualcompletion="ignore-dynamic" style="border-radius: 0px 0px 8px 8px; font-family: inherit; overflow: hidden;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="x1n2onr6" style="font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><div class="x6s0dn4 xi81zsa x78zum5 x6prxxf x13a6bvl xvq8zen xdj266r xktsk01 xat24cr x1d52u69 x889kno x4uap5 x1a8lsjc xkhd6sd xdppsyt" style="align-items: center; border-bottom: 1px solid var(--divider); color: var(--secondary-text); display: flex; font-family: inherit; justify-content: flex-end; line-height: 1.3333; margin: 0px 16px; padding: 10px 0px;"><div class="x1c4vz4f x2lah0s xci0xqf" style="background-color: white; color: #65676b; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9375rem; width: 7px;"></div><span style="font-size: 0.9375rem;"><div class="x9f619 x1n2onr6 x1ja2u2z x78zum5 x2lah0s x1qughib x1qjc9v5 xozqiw3 x1q0g3np xykv574 xbmpl8g x4cne27 xifccgj" style="align-items: stretch; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #65676b; display: flex; flex-flow: row; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; justify-content: space-between; margin: -6px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"></div></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-5102509979898582842024-02-18T13:17:00.001+01:002024-02-18T13:17:05.348+01:00Elia meets Karl Marx at the South Sea House<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-outline-level: 3;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-outline-level: 3;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 16.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEtbVEpoMQYmq_o53HCevbFT1kCsFJf2e-Ec9f9c_ah2PPhhB504KJgYeIivYjOBDvv8Ma6b8PeHK5gTInBqnqzYd651Sd8h678f_D1pyu-X-1NjqhyphenhyphenK_MqgzRd3RGUnYyBBi3FPmpDhsM88Ub0fQTqF2xeNae8JDxkSqcq5kEeMemjS7HCgBdcA/s460/lambplaque.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="259" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEtbVEpoMQYmq_o53HCevbFT1kCsFJf2e-Ec9f9c_ah2PPhhB504KJgYeIivYjOBDvv8Ma6b8PeHK5gTInBqnqzYd651Sd8h678f_D1pyu-X-1NjqhyphenhyphenK_MqgzRd3RGUnYyBBi3FPmpDhsM88Ub0fQTqF2xeNae8JDxkSqcq5kEeMemjS7HCgBdcA/s320/lambplaque.jpg" width="180" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">When
Charles Lamb, a scholarship boy at Christ’s Hospital, was fifteen, one of his
patrons, Thomas Coventry, had a discussion with a City merchant, Joseph Paice,
concerning the boy. According to Lucas’s biography of Lamb, Coventry, a bearish
plutocrat of the pure 18th century type, said to Price, ““There is a lad that I
placed some years since in the Blue Coat school, now on the point of leaving
it, and I know not what on earth to do with him.” “Let him have the run of the
counting house till something better offers,” said Mr. Paice.” (71)<br />
<br />
The conversation of such men was like unto the grinding mechanism of fate, and
they shaped Charles Lamb’s entire professional life from that moment on. Or
rather, they shaped one of the outstanding facts about Lamb: he made his money
as a clerk. He was first with Mr. Paice at the South Sea House, and then went
into the accounting department at India House.<br />
<br />
Lamb is one of the exemplary clerks of literature. He wrote about it; he lived
it; he chafed within it, he knew the chair, desk, and great books where the
figures flowed down the page, representing empire and time. He worked in the
ruins of one colonial venture – the South Sea House – and in the midst of the
short flourishing of another – the India House – during a period in which the
merchant class was in need of the science of political economics and was
getting it from the likes of James Mill (India House) and David Ricardo
(merchant/speculator). In fact, the India House and its successor, the India
Colonial office, was a site associated with some of the great Victorian
intellectual families – the Mills, the Stephens, the Stracheys. Under its wing,
Macaulay sortied out to India and laid the foundation for the application of
utilitarianism to law, a work completed by James Fitzjames Stephen.<br />
<br />
In a footnote to H.W. Boot’s informative article, Real incomes of the British
middle<br />
class, 1760-1850: the experience of clerks at the East India Company (1999),
Boot defines the term clerk like this:<br />
<br />
<br />
“… it conjures up Dickensian images of oppressed men on meagre incomes
struggling to<br />
maintain respectability. In fact 'clerk' was a common appellation applied to a
large group of occupations ranging from the poorest menial clerk who never
earned more than 100 pounds per annum to men who carried the highest
administrative and financial responsibilities in government, commerce,and
finance. “<br />
<br />
Lamb’s first Elia essay is a portrait of the clerks of South Sea house. The
characters are, evidently, composites, but the survey of this “Noah’s ark’ of
‘odd fishes’ catches the monumental ritual and economic importance of the desk
and the counter, which become symbolic centers of the life story. What the bed
is to the libertine, the desk is to the clerk. In each of his profiles, Lamb
divides the life into out of office information hobbies (and eating), and in
the office propinquities (and eating). As in Bartleby, one notices the strong
place of food in the office. Food not only provides the energy for labor power
– it provides a sensual outlet to another world, one that is not chained to the
desk. In the same way, the hobbies are rather like the larger shadow the clerk
casts as he makes his way out into the candlelit hours of his free time. “John
Tipp”, for instance, is an amateur musician, and has a life as one, with other
amateur musicians. But he also has another life: “But at his desk Tipp was
quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental,
were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke.
Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted.” <br />
<br />
The major portion of Lamb’s time as a clerk was spent at the India House. He
was received there on April 5, 1792, in the accounting department. At that
time, according to Boot, the India House was one of the biggest employers in
London, paying 1,730 persons to keep the books, supervise the docks, guard the
sheds, etc. In Lamb’s case, he gave a five hundred pound bond and agreed to
work there for three years on probation, at the end of which he was to receive
a salary, which began at 40 pounds and rose, the next year, to 70. He spent
exactly thirty three years there, and was released early, with a handsome
retirement, no doubt due to his writing and his celebrity. In one of the great
Elia essays, The Superannuated Man, he describes the event of his retirement in
terms of time. As a clerk, he had Sundays off: “but Sundays, admirable as the
institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very<br />
reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In
particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in
the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the
ballad-singers—the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets.”<br />
<br />
He also had vacation: “But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at
Christmas,with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a full week in the summer
to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire.”<br />
<br />
From his letters, one finds that Lamb had more free time than that – but as a
composite portrait of the clerk’s life, this is representative.<br />
<br />
After his retirement, Lamb describes the experience of freedom – freedom that
is not political, but existential: “I was in the condition of a prisoner in the
old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could
scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into
Eternity—for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to
himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever
manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast
revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or
judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.”<br />
<br />
Let me depart from Lamb here, and bring into the picture Karl Marx’s writing
about the agent of circulation, which has given rise to a lot of controversy
among Marxist economists. On the one hand, in Capital II and III, Marx develops
his notion of ‘unproductive labor’, by which he simply means those activities
that are defined in terms of the circulation of the commodity, bought from the
producer, and put on the market to be bought either by a consumer or another
merchant or refiner. Marx also throws into the definition of unproductive labor
those things appertaining to surveillance, management, etc. There has been a
lot of controversy because the principles of the definition of unproductive
labor, in Capital, are slightly at variance with the principles laid down in
the Manuscript on Surplus Value from the 1860s. I myself think that the
division between unproductive and productive labor is confused by taking the
static view of it – in the course of time, an unproductive branch of labor can
generate a producing infrastructure, while productive labor in some branch can,
of course, become extinct, due to its being made obsolete by technology.<br />
<br />
However, the reflections on commercial capital and money –
Warenhandlungskapital and Handlunggeld – are decisive, and sociologically apt.
This segment can be treated as an independent unit in the collective system of
circulation. Looked at in terms of social phenomenology, Marx makes this Hermes
place – the place of pure metamorphoses in which what happens is, in a sense,
that nothing happens. When the producer realizes his surplus value by selling
to the middleman, from the proceeds of which he again purchases labor power and
material to continue producing, the middleman, the Tiresias of capitalism, has
only begun. He has expended his capital, either borrowed or taken from his
stock, to buy products wholly for resale. There is evidently no magic in this,
and yet, like the producer, in the ideal case, the successful merchant realizes
a profit. While the merchant’s employees are exploited just as the factory
hands are, the merchant’s employees do not create the kind of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>surplus value that comprises productive
capital. And although they may be formally exploited just as the worker is,
there is a sociological difference that does drive a real divide between them.<br />
<br />
About this, there is much to say. But for the moment, notice that for Marx,
this commercial segment is subordinate to the true producers, the
manufacturers. If the commercial segment becomes too important, accrues too
much economic power, the manufacturer can, theoretically, erase the middleman
and encroach into the merchant’s territory.<br />
<br />
In fact, though, the dream of getting rid of unproductive labor – dreamt most
recently by the advocates of the New Economy who projected that the computer
maker would simply sell the computer on the internet, the automaker would sell
the auto on the internet, etc., etc. in a happy deflationary spiral satisfying
both customer and producer – does not happen.<br />
<br />
Instead, as many Marxist economists (Sweezy, Moseley, Wollf) have pointed out,
on many dimensions the composition of developed capitalist economies shows that
unproductive labor – both in terms of surveillance work and in terms of
circulation – becomes increasingly important in developed capitalist economies
on several dimensions: for instance, in the number of people employed in
unproductive labor and the amount of the investment of the GDP in unproductive
branches of economic activity. In 1987, Edward Wollf estimated that as much as
40 percent of employees were unproductive laborers.<br />
<br />
The peculiar sociological characteristics of this segment impress themselves
upon the dynamic of this segment – for it is from this segment that most
knowledge work, most representational work, has branched out.<br />
<br />
It is here that the economic rationality of the classical type – homo
oeconomicus – emerged, and plausibly describes the kind of strategies that make
up the landscape of commercial metamorphoses. At the same time, it is here,
too, that the alienation from the time of one’s life has found expression in
the aesthetic sphere – in fact, thematically dominates the aesthetic sphere.
This is important in as much as the population of the aesthetic, or cultural
industries – driven originally by the necessity of closing the discontinuities
that can arise in this segment of circulation when demand lacks or there is an
oversupply of goods – overlaps the population that sits at the desks of the
counting houses. The media that they have produced is the semiosphere in which
all are now bathed, worker, housewife and clerk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: #FEFDFA; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-30631647567371687172024-02-17T10:22:00.002+01:002024-02-17T10:22:11.917+01:00The A.M.E delivers its soul: or just say no to crushing Gazan children in the rubble<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Surprising news from the states! Myself, I thought there
were only two gospels there - the gospel of hate and the gospel of prosperity.
And that Christianity had faded from the national fabric, never to be seen
again. But the Bishops of the A.M.E have actually shown a Christian concern with
slaughtering children to the honour of Baal - or in other words, the ongoing
genocide in Gaza - and have had the gall to suggest that the U.S. not
contribute to tearing apart kids, slaughtering patients in hospitals, and
starving to death the general population. Obviously, this is wholly
anti-semitic - anti-semitic in the line of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekial. Also
anti-semitic, according to the new paragons of Israeli ultranationalism, is the
entire liberal culture of diasporic Jews. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Out of their own mouths.... No sane or moral person could
argue that the murders committed by Hamas justify seven children killed for
each person murdered. However, those who argue this obviously have no concern
whatsoever with the murdered, and - to use Ezekial's words:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">"When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and
thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked
way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his
blood will I require at thine hand.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">19 Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his
wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou
hast delivered thy soul.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and
commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling-block before him, he shall die: because
thou hast not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, and his righteousness
which he hath done shall not be remembered; but his blood will I require at
thine hand.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">21 Nevertheless if thou warn the righteous man, that the
righteous sin not, and he doth not sin, he shall surely live, because he is
warned; also thou hast delivered thy soul."<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ah, the undelivered souls of the "Western
alliance". Twittering like mad on all the major media, from the NYT to Fox
news. Stumbling blocks all.<o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-55299031234819126942024-02-16T11:45:00.000+01:002024-02-16T11:45:09.422+01:00Montpellier and my backpack<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I'm in Montpellier - my second fave city in France - and I'm thinking this morning of Joseph Conrad. Joe, as I call him, had a bag lifted from him when he and the family were temporarily living in Montpellier. </span></span></p><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">My own bag does not contain the manuscript for The Secret Agent, but it did hold a nice red scarf, my favorite, and my red and yellow notebook, into which I had scribbled an amazing maze of notes concerning the three stories I've been trying to write. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />I wore this backpack when Adam and I made the usual routine at the Oddyseum, on the outskirts of town. The Oddyseum is Adam's favorite (well, unitl les Halles in Paris grew a Krispy Kream store, which now fills Adam's dreams with fat American donuts), There is an arcade in the cinema - with an excellent Walking dead video game. There's an old fashioned pin ball game, at which Adam is an old hand. And there is an air hockey table. The furniture, basically, of heaven. Plus, the mall has a Frozen Yogurt stand, where for a few euros you can get an amazing amount of toppings, including disgusting multi-color Strumpts, a candy you suddenly cease being able to put in your mouth after the age of fifteen. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br />Prelude, this, to the experience of putting down all my bags, including the backpack, so that I had a free hand at air hockey. Adam had some bad luck - he usually beats me pretty solidly. The victories must have gone to my head, cause I set down my cool backback and in the aftergame talk I drifted away from the bag. When I drifted back, it was gone. So, if some boy from Montpellier bursts upon the publishing world with a very complex story about Princesse Jacqueline de Broglie, I'm gonna scream PLAGIARISM! and feel very au courant, since plagiarism is everybody's fave subject lately. <br />But I have a feeling that the booster of my backpack unceremoniously dumped the notebooks in a trashcan.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">I feel sorry for the Princesse.</span></p></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-40150886933277496912024-02-15T16:46:00.004+01:002024-02-15T19:39:13.050+01:00Intersigne: at the crossroads of magic and positivism<h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> <br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitPlc96-SGClha46dHKqavUR4kthRmOVb_kJ4JvJXFhyr1nOd91YhGtGinf6_y-VOz3caN_PvHt8l0J93U-WyjE6hSkBSZRnM6JLfWPFJ7cYDoHTj2JjihMikKvT2A4WHovZIrg0hlgh5YlDfqZ-vOfYUxlvtB0Aa-RZibA59Yev9QQa6aFlPvcg/s733/2-Odilon-Redon.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="733" data-original-width="595" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitPlc96-SGClha46dHKqavUR4kthRmOVb_kJ4JvJXFhyr1nOd91YhGtGinf6_y-VOz3caN_PvHt8l0J93U-WyjE6hSkBSZRnM6JLfWPFJ7cYDoHTj2JjihMikKvT2A4WHovZIrg0hlgh5YlDfqZ-vOfYUxlvtB0Aa-RZibA59Yev9QQa6aFlPvcg/s320/2-Odilon-Redon.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><br />In a conference on his friend, Villiers de l’isle-Adam, Mallarme speaks of “an
exceptional story at the extremity of which is a tomb.” </span><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">This story, for Mallarme, is typical both in
its subject and in the “outsider” place of its author: it is “an enlargement of
the Shadow”. The story is called <i>L’intersigne</i>.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">The Breton folklorist
Anatole Le Braz, in La Légende de la Mort (1893), used a similar reference to the
Shadow to define intersignes:</span> <i><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">Comme
l’ombre projetée en avant de ce qui doit arrive – “</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">as a shadow projected in front of what must arrive”.
Intersignes, in Breton popular culture, are coincidences or strange events that
advertised a coming death. </span><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">“Intersignes announce death. But the person to whom the intersigne
is manifested is rarely the person threatened by death.” The person to whom the
intersigne is manifested possesses a gift, but not one that can be obtained by
teaching. You must have the “gift of seeing”. “Within this privileged category,
those who are ranked first are those “who have passed through holy ground and
have come out of it before being baptised.” For instance, a baby who is carried
over the ground of a cemetery before being baptised will have the gift of an
expanded sight. “Those who deny intersignes receive as many as those who have
the gift. They deny them uniquely because they don’t know how to see nor
understand them; and they don’t want to understand, at all, nor see anything of
the other life.”</span></span></h4><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">Villiers de l’Isle-Adam wrote his story, Intersigne, in 1867. </span><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">It was eventually included in the collection,
Cruel Stories, in 1883, with some editorial changes. </span><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">Villiers was a native
Breton, and evidently had received his knowledge of the phenomenon orally.</span></span></h4><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;"><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">It is a “weird” tale of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Xavier de la
V…, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>who feels suddenly compelled to
visit his friend in Brittany, l’abbe Maucombe, who lives in a remote parish of
Saint-Maur. Xavier de la V., as we later learn, has every reason to stay in
Paris, since he is in the midst of an important law suit. But he feels
physically compelled to visit Maucombe, who he has not seen for years. He uses
the excuse of hunting. Maucombe and his housekeeper welcome V., who finds himself
afflicted with an almost epileptic case of vision – he sees the house, his
room, even his friend, for brief moments, in a state of extreme estrangement.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">« Is this really the
house that I saw just a moment ago ? What age denounces to me, now, the
long fissures between pale leaves ? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- this building had a strange air - the tiles
illuminated by the rays of the agony of the evening burned with an intense light
- the hospitable portal invited me with its three steps; but, in concentrating
my attention on these grey stones, I saw that some had been polished, and that
traces of letters chiselled in them still remained, and I saw that they came
from the neighboring cemetery – whose black crosses appeared to me on one side,
about a hundred steps away. And the house seemed changed to the point of giving
me the creeps, while the lugubrious echoes of the hammer-knocker, that I let
fall, echoed, in my trance, in the interior of this place like the vibrations
of a funeral bell. “<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">Part of the genius of this
story is the relation between text and title, Intersigne, a strange word to the
reader. It is never explained, never even mentioned in the text. It rides the
text, rather, as a sort of fate or curse. The title is felt in the story that
V. tells, but is never literally within that story. Which, in short, is that V.
has been, in effect, summoned to L’abbe Maucombe’s abode in order to see these
things, in these moments; and to have a dream, or vision, of a priest handing
him a coat. The dream is realized – L’abbe Maucombe accompanies V., who the day
after his arrival wants to flee the house (it is here that we learn that he is
in the midst of an important lawsuit), out to the road leading him back to the
nearest village, where V. has left his coat – and,due to the rain, lends him his,
L’abbe Maucombe’s, own coat. A coat that, as V. learns at the end, that
accompanied the priest on his journey to the holy land and “touched the Tomb.”<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; line-height: 107%;">He learns at the end, too,
of course, from a letter, that L’abbe Maucombe died two days after his visit,
from a cold caught in the rain of the day he accompanied V. to the road. V.
was, in effect, not only the see-er of the death, but its proximate cause. </span></span></h4><div><span><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"><b>2.</b></span></span></div><div><span><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><b><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto">The term intersigne drifts through a certain literature of folklore and parapsychology, and ends up in some interesting places. The philologist and scholar Louis Massignon, who started out as a Christian mystic and ended as an Islamic one, uses it in a few places in his works to designate a mystically charged coincidence. In Massignon’s work, the intersigne is not just an event of some kind prefiguring a death – it is a name for all significant coincidences – correlation without seeming cause. The notion of cause is not, of course, abandoned – rather the causes aren’t seen, because the witnesses lack the gift of seeing. This gives the mystic a neatly outlined historical place – the mystic can sense in the coincidences that present themselves in symbolic circumstances the overall causes – either the work of God, or the work of some transcendental pattern. </div><div dir="auto">Things get interesting, to me, when the intersigne is taken up as a methodological prompt by Roberto Calasso in his great, reactionary book, the Ruin of Kasch. This is a historical “fiction” that adopts the intersigne as the structure underlying the message, which is a very 1980s, end of the Cold War message: our evils stem from the French revolution. It is a de Maistre hopscotch from the guillotining of Marie Antoinette to the Cambodian genocide of Pol Pot. </div><div dir="auto">Of course, Calasso can’t be entirely reduced to the anti-modern paradigm. Like de Maistre, he is full of paradoxes and special information – he is a great knower of the Upanishads and ancient Greek texts, as well as pockets of European, and especially French, history. Like Carlo Ginzberg, he is fascinated by the savage within the European persona. Almost always when the term “the West” is employed, it refers not to the vast mass of urban and rural peasants and their beliefs, but a very minority group of power brokers, adventurers, scholars and writers. This is a highly distorted picture of the many cultures within Eurasia, from Danish sheepherders to Sicilian sulfur miners. What is said about the Nahautl – for instance, the belief that humans can transform into animals – could be said for respectable bourgeois living in Normandy in the 17th century. </div><div dir="auto">In this sense, the fall of the ancien regime was a colonialist project, with the colonized now being the peasant, the shepherd, the tinker and the tailor, ruthlessly enrolled in rationalism’s project. Or Capital’s – although Calasso takes a very reactionary view of Marx. </div><div dir="auto">I love the passage where Calasso shows his hand, embracing a methodology that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s methodology in the passages, through Adorno’s eyes: at the crossroads of magic and positivism.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto">“A gnostic history, which we lack, is largely made up of “intersignes” (as Massingon called them), unusual warnings, coincidences (as historians call them, to avoid them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, constellations latent in the sky of thought.”</div><div dir="auto">A gnostic history, a jigsaw puzzle, a frolic of dialectical materialism.</div></div></b></div></div></span></span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-11124566571429231012024-02-11T11:52:00.002+01:002024-02-11T11:52:55.839+01:00The pessimists: on Antoine Compagnon's Les Anti-modernes<p style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In Antoine Compagnon’s marvelous and encyclopedic Les Antimodernes (which rustles with excellent quotations – among its other virtues. For reasons I cannot fathom, it has not been translated into English. Some university press better get on the stick!), he attempts to construct an anatomy of reaction. To this end, he posits a number of figures, constellation-creating themes. One is counter-revolution, one is counter-Enlightenment. And then: :”The third figure of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">antimodernity, which is a moral figure af</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">ter the historical and philosophical ones, is pessimism, under whatever name one wants to give it: despair, melancholy, mourning, spleen or ‘mal de siècle.’”</span></span></b></p><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><p style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I know this devil well – who, living as I have over the decades from the 1960s to now, has not felt the urgent touch of spleen. Yet constitutionally, I am, as ever, a spoiled child. I rarely wake up feeling sad, bad, or in mourning – I usually wake up with a very childish sense that this is gonna be a good day. </span></p><p style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Compagnon’s book is subtitled, rather surprisingly, From Joseph de Maistre to Roland Barthes, with the inclusion of Barthes being a little controversial nuance, much noticed in the reviews in France. Thus, it is a historical text, an intellectual history, that deals with the anti-modern as a post- revolutionary phenomenon. His touchstone in the book is Chateaubriand, from whose work he has mined an endless array of quotations – this is a book overflowing with apt and memorable quotations, in this respect reminding me of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s eccentric book about Edmund Burke, The Great Melody. There is a reason for this: the reactionary tends towards the maxim, the conclusion converged upon by the wise. Judgement is the rhetorical tool of reaction par excellence. American liberalism has its credo in the often heard phrase: don't be judgemental. And it is no use telling the liberal that this phrase is itself judgemental, and not in a good way: it dismisses the judgemental without understanding or in any way measuring its considerable sentimental force. If I had a car and thus was in the market for a bumpersticker, I would buy one that says: Apophansis will get ya if you don't watch out! Which might say everything about why I lack bot a car and a bumper sticker. Hmm.</span></p><p style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Compagnon uncovers pessimism as the god or afternoon demon at the intersection between the psychological and the “historical”. Here, character forms around the sense of the modern, or contemporary – which is condemned within the present as a decline. This sense of decline is felt both by the reactionary – which measures the decline from the Revolution – and the leftist – who measures the decline in terms of the counter-revolution that followed the Revolution. The persona of the latter was drawn by Flaubert in L’education sentimentale, embodied in the math teacher, Sénécal. For the leftist, the possibilities “opened” by the Revolution, the possibility of liberation, has been foreclosed by the forces of reaction, which have taken hostage the contemporary moment. The leftist is a pessimist by the logic of optimism. Nathaniel Mackay coined the wonderful phrase, oppositional nostalgia, for the dilemma of progressive pessimism. Whereas the anti-modern has to deal with a sense that the entire world, the entire order, has been either irreversibly perverted or lost. The anti-modern lays claim to nostalgia as its own intellectual property. But, as Compagnon points out, the reactionary is implicated in a dialectic that continually throws him into the company of his enemies – for didn’t Rousseau, the arch-devil, begin with a nostalgia for the savage, who is born “without chains”? Whereas the reactionary’s nostalgia is a precisely for chains – the chains of tradition, the chains that will bind those who are, in the reactionaries eyes, born for chains. The great mass of people.</span></p><p style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">The term “pessimism” was not “au courant” during Baudelaire’s time: “We find, only two occurrences of the term pessimism and tow of pessimiste in the Tresor de la langue francaise between 1800 and 1850, but 129 of pessimism and 47 of pessimist between 1851 and 1900, then the word rapidly vanishes.” <br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Compagnon points out that Schopenauer was in vogue in Paris during the fin de siècle; the same could be said of Vienna, a city which is not within the geography of Compagnon’s book. Schopenhauer’s literary influence extends to the kind of philosophy of culture that is not practiced by academic philosophers. It is the province of the great reactionary outlaws: Nietzsche, Weininger, and Spengler. Pessimism, for all of them, was a personal escape hatch from history – allowing them to develop their own myths of history. <br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Pessimism, even if it “rapidly vanished” after 1900, did kill optimism as an intellectually respectable position. In a dialectical pirouette that is amusing, optimism is now a forced gesture of that most reactionary set, the Steven Pinker/”race realist” crowd, which uses it as a club to enforce a program of Western (white male) supremacy. It’s an essentially loveless optimism. <br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Love is, I think, the great absent in the anti-modern tradition Compagnon outlines. Love is a dangerous force. To anyone raised, as I was, on the Bible School gospels, the oddest thing about the reactionary embrace of Christianity is that it takes the heart out of it. There is no love here. There are only absolute reasons to condemn. Hell, for the reactionary Christian, is a very rich concept; heaven, on the other hand, is simply a reward, a sort of retirement package for the successful moral entrepreneur. Of the anti-modernes that Compagnon deals with, only Baudelaire, I think, had any notion of love, and thus of heaven – even if it was a cracked love, a love, ultimately, of his mother, the mother stolen from him by his stepfather. It was love like wormwood, but the image of love remained with him, made him a poet of a glimpsed, a transient, utopia:<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">…. Fugitive beauté<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité ?<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">O toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !</span></p></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-16048534341296045692024-02-07T19:15:00.003+01:002024-02-07T19:15:29.926+01:00Poem by Karen Chamisso<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 193.9pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial Rounded MT Bold, sans-serif;"> </span></p><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">In the wisecracker's Bible</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">sez the man with the plan</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">no sucker gets an even break.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Shall we “ripen our regard” and see </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>Judas hanging from a tree?</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">The “pain of the body is but the body of pain.” </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Loss, and loss again</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">is coin's knowledge, and what I have to go on. </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">The shiver of the second hand</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">advancing Alice to the fat throne</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">and Little Boy Blue</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">to the enormous anonymity of the chopper</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">has shadowed my magnus opus:</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">written in invisible ink, </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">call it: the art of ending.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Judas should have read the fine print.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Poor little greenie.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Karen Chamisso</div></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-3936076333378460522024-02-05T14:58:00.001+01:002024-02-05T14:58:45.088+01:00paper in the clenched fist: the waste books<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRt2uO0KzmTzSh7LxoFRX17P1aTV7RWgzMcBL-128S12BtTckK1Zpu4vp7VD4qXzpDT-AyWmXO5x3uTZf5kMzFX9eouSONe9XCnqVywLeBH3YzwuBE14LiCQlNAEYn8nfMMEt8BO4ZvJv9khFEqwDe7ZrMCrpzlt3M8NBQCcSKpMNFcDDTHCpvFQ/s1280/Juan-de-Mairena-1280x640.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1280" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRt2uO0KzmTzSh7LxoFRX17P1aTV7RWgzMcBL-128S12BtTckK1Zpu4vp7VD4qXzpDT-AyWmXO5x3uTZf5kMzFX9eouSONe9XCnqVywLeBH3YzwuBE14LiCQlNAEYn8nfMMEt8BO4ZvJv9khFEqwDe7ZrMCrpzlt3M8NBQCcSKpMNFcDDTHCpvFQ/s320/Juan-de-Mairena-1280x640.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There is a certain kind of book that doesn’t have a genre label per se; it falls somewhere between the essay and the treatise; like the the essay, it concentrates on some line of thought aroused by a situation or an idea, although it claims the right to break off at any moment and diverge into some other topic; like the treatise, it is unafraid of abstraction and generalization, although it is wary of universals and likes to consider difference as a positive moment, an </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">unassimilable energy. Some of its authors call their books novels, others fragments, others reflections. Often, the authors are not the collectors of the totality of the book – a job that devolves on the editors. The fragments of classical texts produced, in the literary culture of the seventeenth century, a paradigm for the moralist who first seized on this diffuse genre. Pascal’s Pensees, for instance, are often considered to be a sketch for a book that Pascal meant someday to write – but what if Pascal intended to produce exactly this fragmentary text? Other instances: the Scratch books of Lichtenberg, Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves, Pessoa’s various Books of Disquiet, Ludwig Hohl’s Notizen, Nietzsche’s extensive Nachlass. </span></span></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">A leading theme, here, is the scratching, the hastily scribble gloss, the note one finds in one’s pocket and throws out. Man is a thinking reed – a reed broken off and filled with ink. Waste paper is paper that has been used and lost its use, and perhaps aggressively wadded up. Every wadded up piece of paper is a shadow of a clenched fist, after all. It is paper on the way to the waste paper basket, carrying words that have lost their use. That is the social situation of these books – they are caught somewhere between the desk and the garbage. At least, in the imagination.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">The waste book has a strong relation with the philosophical novel – and certain of the latter, such as Paul Valery’s M. Teste, go over the line. Perhaps the reason is that ideas in themselves – ideas in their natural setting – have as limited a place in modern life as mice have in modern homes. They are an accidental, corner feature of life. Even in jobs like research scientist or professor, “having ideas” is not in the job description – at best, creativity squeezes in there, but playing well with others, getting good grades, and producing acres of watertreading non-waste articles for journals is what counts.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Ideas are for losers. Or they are viewed, in the 101 classroom, as emanations of heads. Heads having ideas, which often “influence” other heads having ideas, discuss in 400 words or less. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">A mostly forgotten waste book by Antonio Machado, with the title Juan Mairena, should be better known in the Angophone world. Ben Belitt translated it back in 1963, but that edition has long gone out of print. The French edition is published by Anatolia: editions du rocher, who also publish the translations of Rozanov. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Juan Mairena is one of Machado’s “complementaries”. As Pessoa’s critics have pointed out, Machado’s “heteronyms” – Mairena and his teacher, Abel Martin – don’t have the rowdy independence of Pessoa’s personas. But Belitt’s notion that they cast light on Machado as a poet, a light he could not cast in his own name, is a good one. In his foreword, Machado writes that Mairena was “a poet, philosopher and rhetorician, born in Seville in 1865 and buried in Casariego de Tapia in 1909” A nineteenth century man, although is conversations, notes and lectures are evidently saturated with Machado’s own experience after 1909, including his stint attending the lectures of Bergson in Paris in 1910.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Here’s a translation of the French translation of one of Juan de Mairena’s entries. This entry, with its Alice in Wonderland logic, expresses the spirit of the waste book, as opposed to the fictions and factions of the other literary branches. </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“One says that there is no rule without an exception. Is that really the case? Myself, I don’t dare affirm it. In any case, if that confirmation contains a partial truth, it must be a truth of fact, the reason for which can’t be fully satisfied. Every exception, one adds, confirms the rule. This does not seem so evident; however, it is more acceptable, from the logical point of view. For if all exceptions belong to a rule, if there is an exception, there is a rule, and he who thinks exception thinks of a rule. This already constitutes a truth of reason, that is to say, a truism, a simple tautology which teaches us nothing. We can’t be satisfied with stopping here. So, let’s be more subtle… </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">1. If every exception confirms the rule, a rule without an exception would be a non-confirmed rule, although by no means a non-rule.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">2. A rule with exceptions will always be stronger than a rule without exceptions, which will lack an exception to have itself confirmed.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">3. A rule will be more of a rule the richer it is in exceptions.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">4. The ideal rule will be composed of nothing but exceptions.”</div></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-11217909862603231712024-02-04T16:45:00.003+01:002024-02-04T16:45:37.845+01:00a date, a collectivity, a plot<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Often, Ulysses is read as a
novel that has a myth driven plot. And it is true that the Odyssey provides the
framework within which Joyce does his magic. But I – who love and honor Ulysses
above all other books – have always found fascinating is the idea of a plot
that does not follow the usual script but that follows the city, over one day,
in bits, as a supreme fiction. Immediately after Ulysses, there was an
explosion of city novels, including Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Doblin’s
Alexanderplatz, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – the Woolf arising not out of a
passion for Joyce, of course. As well, Bely out of another novelistic tradition
laid down the tracks of Petersburg. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But gradually the “telling” of a
collective deflated. Or perhaps I should say it went into the sci fi genre and the
novels of Gaddis and Pynchon and Inga Schulze – among those authors I know –
and the subjectivity of some protagonist within what Zadie Smith calls lyrical realism
came back to haunt our “best books of the year” lists.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Still, I like collectives.
Cities are one example, dates are another.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">A day, a year, a decade, these
measures have all acquired a rather unjustified weight in our historical
consciousness. A history without dates is not only possible, but it is the goal
towards which history trends, just as literature, according to Mallarme, aspires
to music. One of the great properties of the internet is that, given the
massive amount of digitalized material in hundreds of languages that are now
accessible to the merest keyboard peasant, it is possible to create pluck a day
in the past – say February 2, 1922 – and give it a material body – or at least
a phantasmal one. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Which was my mad thought a
couple of days ago. Since then, I’ve been gnawing at February 2, 1922 with all
my might, and I have considered that maybe I have finally reached the down
slope of senility. Or maybe I’ve been there all along!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Some notes:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">On February 2, 1922, Kafka was on a four week vacation from work. He
chose, tubercular weakling that he was, to spend it in the mountains of Spindelmuhle
(or Špindlerův Mlýn) in Northern Czechoslovakia. In his journal, he wrote:</span>
“<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the
morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in
all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [,
specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless
wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this
is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.</span>”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The program of queering the canon has, of course, enjoyed this moment of
wobbling heteronormativity. B. with his rolled up stocking in those snowy
mountains, and K. with his coughing, summons up another death: The Death in
Venice. Although it isn’t as though Kafka was “home” – he took a room a Hotel
Krone, which was not to his liking. At the same hotel, his physician and the
physician’s daughter was staying. Kafka was writing The Castle – Reiner Stach,
his biographer, pins the bits of the geography that went into the novel.
Perhaps B. became Barnabas, the odd and awkward messenger sent by the Castle to
serve the land surveyor. On the other hand, whatever sexual thoughts Kafka was
entertaining, he was mostly a very exhausted man, on the verge of serious lung
problems, who kept slipping in the snow. A sexually deflating experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">On February 2, 1922, the author of Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, sat at
his desk in his great villa in the Herzog Park district of Munich and wrote a letter
to his friend, Ernst Bertram. Mann was approximately 9 hours south, by bus, of
the struggling skinny Insurance man in the health resort of Spindlemuehle. It
had been a snowy winter in Munich. A railroad strike throughout Germany was
stopping trains, but in Bavaria the railroad workers, and tram drivers, were
still on the job. </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Mann’s letter to Bertram was written a couple days after his brother,
Heinrich, had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance in the snow because he
was suffering from influenza and appendicitis. The doctors were worried. Thomas
Mann’s wife visited Heinrich’s longsuffering wife. And the two brothers, who
had avoided each other since 1916, due to their political disagreements – though
they lived 15 minutes by tram from each other – reconciled over Heinrich’s “death
bed.” Thomas does not foresee a friendship with Heinrich – a “decently human
modus vivendi is all it can come to.” Thomas doesn’t say it in so many words,
but he has come to a “turning” in his own viewpoint. The TM of that great
anti-modern pamphlet, Observations of a Non-Political Man, which was aimed not
so subtly at Heinrich’s socialist-humanism (in the midst of WWI, Heinrich wrote
a book about Zola, of all people!), has come to realize the price of being
celebrated by the extreme right. In the letter to Bertram, however, his
complaint is that still, as he has been “assured”, Heinrich never read the ONPM!
A deadly insult, this. But at the end of the letter, Thomas speaks of a “certain
evolution towards each other” – which is more evident on Thomas’s side than
Heinrich’s. Thomas Mann’s “Wende” is generally described as his acceptance of
democracy. I think in his perspective this looks a little different. What he
was accepting was civilization. The large structural binary of culture v. civilization,
Mann’s version of the German Sonderweg, or alternative path, against French
civilization and all it implied, was abandoned. </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">On February 2, 1922, a 35 year old woman with her curly dirty blonde
hair in a discombobulated bob could be seen at 7a.m at the Gare de Lyon. The
weather outside the great vaulted building was cold and windy. The train
arrived from Dijon. A man came out of the train and handed the woman a package.
She hurried with this package outside, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver an
address: 9 Rue de l’Universit</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">é</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">. The taxi stopped before the address, the woman
got out, paid the taxi driver, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>went to
the door of the building – Hotel Lenox – and rang the bell of the room she was
searching for. James Joyce came to the door, and the woman – Sylvia Beach –
handed him his copy, the first printed copy ever, of Ulysses. She kept a copy
for herself. </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We know this day must have been windy, with sleet and rain. Benjamin Cremieux
wrote his friend, Marcel Proust, on this day: “The glacial rain today is so
saddening that I’m afraid you will be uncomfortable. It comes through the walls
and spoils the joy of the fire [in the fireplace].” Did Proust read Le Matin,
the paper owned by Colette’s husband, to which Colette contributed a column?
Did he, as so many writers, follow certain faits divers? On February 2, 1922,
the paper reported that <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hippolyte
Ferrand had been pronounced not guilty in his trial in Lyon. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ferrand was being tried for the murder of a
trucker named Guillemen – which by itself would have merited little coverage.
It was the backstory that drew readers. It was less a Proustian tale than something
by Maupassant. Ferrand’s brother had been married to a pretty woman named
Louise Grillet. Louise played around on the side. Hippolyte’s brother “coldly”
slew his rival, and got off for it. Then the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>brother had to march off to war. In the
trenches, according to the paper, he received a letter. Who knows what the
contents of the letter were! What is known is that he shot himself in the head.
Louise went to stay with her husband’s family, and while there met a truck
driver named Fayard. They courted, they married, Louise moved into the Fayard
house. All would have been well, save for Guillemen – a fellow truck driver. Louise
was enchanted, and began an affair. Guillemen, who is generally described as a
brute (although his father claimed he was a happy go lucky lad who was always
singing and gay), drove his truck to the Fayard house and started loading up Fayard’s
furniture in his, Guillemen’s, truck. Hippolyte heard that this was going on,
and went to talk to Guillemen, who cursed him out, threatened him, and was
going to beat him when Hippolyte pulled out his revolver and shot him five
times. At the trial, Le Matin’s reporter claimed, it was evident that
Hippolyte, too, was enchanted by the “too beautiful” Louise.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">A likely story. Perhaps it was read by a woman in the Victoria Place Hotel,
about 18 minutes by foot from the Joyce’s place. That woman, Katherine
Mansfield, had arrived two days ago from Montana, Switzerland, leaving her husband,
John Middleton Murray, behind. She went to a clinic run by a Russian,
Manoukhine, who had advertised a technique for treating tubercular cases. In a
letter Mansfield wrote that she had 100 pounds saved up, but that she reckoned
she’d need another 100 pounds at least to pay for the treatments and her stay
in the Hotel. In her Notebook, Mansfield wrote: “ I have a feeling that M. is a
really good man. I also have a sneaking feeling (I use <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that
word ‘sneaking’ advisedly) that he is a kind of unscrupulous imposter.” Sitting
in her room and, perhaps, looking out the window at the miserably wet streets, Mansfield
wrote to Murray that the other doctor at the clinic had reassured her that Manoukhine’s
technique would work. “I am glad I saw this man as well as the other. But isn’t
it strange. Now all this is held out to me – now all is at last hope real hope
there is not one single throb of gladness in my heart. I can think of nothing
but how it will affect us.”</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Mansfield could call upon a ruthless reserve of common sense when she
was face to face with bullshit. There is that beautiful putdown of Howard’s End,
on par with any witticism of Oscar Wilde’s: E. M. Forster never gets any
further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this
teapot. It is not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” I
think she knew, in her heart, that Manoukhine was a rare hand at assuring desperate
patients of a cure, but in the end “there ain’t going to be no cure.”</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ivar Text"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Ivar Text";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Ivar Text",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Shall I continue this, my own tea warming exercise? I have more on this
day, but a little is perhaps too much. Others content themselves with crossword
puzzles. These are crossword lives. </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-77046111655175704892024-02-01T18:14:00.001+01:002024-02-01T18:14:02.375+01:00The Zombie Hero of our time<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On July 11, 1980, there was a traffic accident, a collision, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the road in the hills above a Club Med in
Haiti. One of the involved persons, Emerson Douyon, was a criminologist and anthropologist
from Canada. He wrote an article that begins with the details of the accident,
and its cause, which was as follows: in the backseat with Douyon was a man who,
as the taxi driver in front understood from the conversation they were having,
was dead. The name of the man was Clerveus Narcisse. The taxi driver, learning
that he had a dead man behind him, panicked and ran into the car in front of
him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Douyon’s introduction to the crossroads of beliefs, practices
and crimes is a clever way of showing how the questions asked by policemen and
judges derive from classifications that may not completely hold in a population
that believes, for instance, in zombies. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Narcisse claimed that he died in the Schweizer Hospital in
Deschapelles in Haiti in 1962. There is a folder in the Hospital that shows
that a man with that name did die in the Hospital in 1962. This became an issue
when Narcisse went to the Hospital in 1980, for a hernia issue. The American
doctor there refused to process him, since he was dead, officially. His case,
however, was taken over by a Haitian doctor, who performed the necessary
operation on the hernia. In the opinion of the Haitian doctor, being dead on a
piece of paper and even being buried didn’t necessarily mean that you were dead
dead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Narcissse was one of a “chain of subjects” who researchers were
interested in, victims of a ritual that made them ‘morte apparente’ in vaudou. Douyon’s
brother was a doctor in Haiti. He himself was interested in the zombie as a victim.
This is not a viewpoint that we often encounter: zombie-ism as a crime,
perpetrated against someone. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is an interesting transmutation, on several levels, that led
from the zombie as victim of a ritual in Haiti – a crime victim, which has been
judged in Haitian courts - and the movie and tv zombie. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The latter has become, for better or worse, one of the great
symbols of our age. My off the cuff theory about the plague of zombies is that
it is the mirror of the age of Porn. Probably at no time ever have adolescents had
such total access to the imagry of fucking as they have today. It is a piece of
our social construct that we have no real theoretical framework for. Of course,
we know the male bourgeois European in the 19<sup>th</sup> century went to
brothels as a matter of course, and we know that a great deal of the urban
population, fed by a continuous migration from the country, drifted now and
then into prostitution and out. But there is a living difference between the
nineteenth century experience and our sensu-surround porncast experience since
the 1980s, just as we have no total grasp of the effect of the phthalates,
phenols, organochlorines, perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls, metals, air
pollutants and polybrominated diphenyl ethers that are in the things we eat,
the wrappings of the things we eat, our deodorants and sprays and plastics and
the thousands of minutia that have coated us, infested us, travelled through us
and out as consumers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The media zombie is, in almost all respects, different from the
porn actor or actress. The latter are at least made up to be sexually
attractive, with a fetishistic emphasis on dick, pussy, ass, tits, etc., etc.
The zombie, on the other hand, is all decay. The high concept of a beautiful
zombie has not emerged from the media soup because it violates the sexually depressed
or negated being of the zombie. I exempt here Daybreak, but the show is clearly
cheating, a raid on vampire motifs that has been grafted onto the zombie. There
are definite family likenesses between the zombie and the vampire, but the
former is, by the narrative logic in which it figures, essentially non-sexual. Unlike
other animals, the zombie does not reproduce sexually. It simply decays and
eats. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The slave, of course, did reproduce sexually, and his or her
children were sold – were slaves themselves. Under the sign of this inhuman terror,
one created by the colonizer, the White Mythology (in which the colonizer is
always implicated) created its fetishes and its elaborate erotic mythologies.
But the zombie, by its death, is transported into a new and horrible chapter of
slavery, a sort of Eros degree zero, where even the emancipation of death is
denied. Narcisse claims that after his death he was “resurrected” and forced to
work for 18 years. He eventually escaped, and his case was heard in court. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The close tie between slavery and the zombie has been shuttled
off by the media zombie, of course. Wokeness – by which I mean consciousness of
history – has not touched this theme. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thus, the zombie. The zombie decays – although it is an F/X
mystery how far and to what degree that process of degree proceeds - and eats.
Its eating is its reproductive act – it is by biting that the zombie makes
other zombies. The undead inversion of sex is, of course, sexually coded. Otherwise,
the zombie would not haunt the media. However, it is an odd sexual power. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As Mario Praz noticed, the Byronic hero in early nineteenth
century literature had strong links to the vampire and the sexual automats in
Sade. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the zombie plays a role in our
present circs not unlike the Byronic hero of yore – but where is the fun in not
exaggerating? Certainly I’d link the odd moral panic about AI to the omnipresence
of zombies. AI, of course, supposedly doesn’t decay, and simply eats and eats
information – which it then spits out. Brainless, sexless intelligence – for this
eating and spitting thing is labelled intelligence by peeps who think that intelligence
is a high score on a test. Those aren’t my peeps. Mass produced – exactly as
zombies are mass produced in apocalypse movies. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am waiting for a zombie Hero of our Time, a zombie that goes
beyond death to ultradeath, and comes out beautiful. Because though the
networks, Silicon Valley and a gaggle of billionaires are all determined to
make us believe that chains are forever, I’m betting on emancipation. Clerveus
Narcisse escaped. And that does make him a Hero of Our Time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Batang",serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-8221255903871688762024-01-31T12:17:00.002+01:002024-01-31T12:25:45.995+01:00The perfect poem<p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHxd252vo5cOEtC4TwFhlIeVNTHCKu0KF6GxS8G_Fm8hFyxYTEm8iiFHn1hUfyfKT3BPFtl6veU6CaQoDZQe-B-YMa1v-9c2HLbhPgeGi1xOWY2-y1jcT6P0BOMfYFHJzK_Nh28fbdURKz06LB79QlstYEat2ITMozJKT2Ac4lZjDD85MB3aqcQ/s1300/italy-pompeii-luxury-roman-house-interior-fresco-detail-with-bird-in-a-garden-2PPKCEM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="990" data-original-width="1300" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHxd252vo5cOEtC4TwFhlIeVNTHCKu0KF6GxS8G_Fm8hFyxYTEm8iiFHn1hUfyfKT3BPFtl6veU6CaQoDZQe-B-YMa1v-9c2HLbhPgeGi1xOWY2-y1jcT6P0BOMfYFHJzK_Nh28fbdURKz06LB79QlstYEat2ITMozJKT2Ac4lZjDD85MB3aqcQ/s320/italy-pompeii-luxury-roman-house-interior-fresco-detail-with-bird-in-a-garden-2PPKCEM.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Perfection is a flaw in poetry. Or, to put this another way, the perfect poem must be flawed – it must flow from some essential flaw in the process of thinking or expression, it must bear that impress as fingers bear their fingerprints. </span></span></p><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This is my opinion, and it hovers over my canon of poetry, my personal stash. </span></div><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This morning, I wake up and read the news about Gaza children eating grass to stave off hunger pains and all I can feel is bitterness. The bitterness doesn’t help – <a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a>it is a feeble attempt at a moral equivalence, but I eat, I drink, my stomach is full. It is in this mood that I wanted to read a poem, one of my stash. So I read Wallace Stevens Sunday Morning. </span></div><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The flaw in this poem, from which it flows, is the line: “Death is the mother of beauty.” This seems to me utterly untrue, untrue to the cadaver, untrue to the body’s rot. But here the poem departs from argument and even the larger impression of things in order to fulfil or rather fill itself. That line comes in Part V of the poem, and by that point we have been altering between the central persona, the old woman evoked in part one – an old woman much like me on a Sunday morning, with her “late coffee and oranges” and her domestic bric a brac, the cockatoo “upon a rug” which gives us a suggestive ambiguity – is this the beast woven into the rug or a cockatoo in a cage? Is this real or décor? – and the poet’s inevitable sermoning, his revery upon the old woman. What captures and enraptures me, however, are these lines:</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Divinity must live within herself:</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Elations when the forest blooms; gusty</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">All pleasures and all pains, remembering</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The bough of summer and the winter branch.</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">These are the measures destined for her soul.</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">For those lines, I forgive every flaw. I forgive everything. I am tethered. And that is the perfection of the poem - to tether the reader, or listener. To stop them in mid heartbeat, mid breathing, mid thought, mid middleness of one's muddled life. Flaw and perfection are joined, just for that second.</span></div></div>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-70677362734251398022024-01-30T09:21:00.001+01:002024-01-30T09:21:12.928+01:00The strange birth story of the Empire<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-kXIZW1QNS3bKkQp1_YNM3Az6neuAZYLHzZ65-KTu3xoNX3aQbiEgZl-ufok-Ma0XDGgjKkBWlEV5CWI8vK2g1BkfJfepTA9tEuAotO-Rpj0yVxUyfiIUzio3LY5j4iky6h_VphsymF6hQfp1pz1vmcnLXTaDPnuxQIJYOkQv0_N0QKYOUDcW8g/s259/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-kXIZW1QNS3bKkQp1_YNM3Az6neuAZYLHzZ65-KTu3xoNX3aQbiEgZl-ufok-Ma0XDGgjKkBWlEV5CWI8vK2g1BkfJfepTA9tEuAotO-Rpj0yVxUyfiIUzio3LY5j4iky6h_VphsymF6hQfp1pz1vmcnLXTaDPnuxQIJYOkQv0_N0QKYOUDcW8g/s1600/download.jpg" width="259" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Plutarch, in the life of Romulus, lists several different
stories about the founding of Rome. Each of the stories is a variant on the
strangeness of birth itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">1. The first story is that Rome was founded in the wake of
the exhaustion of a woman named Roma. Roma was a Trojan noblewoman who became
tired of the strategies of the men leading the Trojans into exile. They never
stopped anywhere long. Roma got the women to burn the boats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When this was done, the men were angry at
first, but afterwards, when they had settled of necessity on the Palatine,
seeing themselves in a little while more prosperous than they had hoped, since
they found the country good and the neighbours made them welcome, they paid
high honours to Roma, and actually named the city after her, since she had been
the occasion of their founding it. And from that time on, they say, it has
been<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>customary for the women to salute
their kinsmen and husbands with a kiss; for those women, after they had burned
the ships, made use of such tender salutation as they supplicated their
husbands and sought to appease their wrath.” This is a founding worthy of
Fellini – or Lisa Wertmuller.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">2. The second story is that Romanus, the son of Odyseus and
Circe, colonized the city. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">3. Others say it was Romus, sent by Diomedes from Troy, or
Romis, tyrant of the Latins. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">4. Plutarch writes that the most authentic tradition is that
it was founded by Romulus. But writers “don’t agree about his lineage.” Some
say he was the son of Aeneas and Dexithea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Others say Roma was wedded to Latinus, the son of Telemachus, who gave
birth to Romulus. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">5. But another account, which is “altogether fabulous”, goes
like this. Tarchetus was a cruel king of the Albans. Whether it was due to his
cruelty or for another reason, a strange phantom haunted his house: a penis
rose out of his hearth and remained there for several days. A king with a penis
in his chimney is bound to lose face, sooner or later. So Tarchetus sent to the
oracle of Tethys, who responded that a virgin must have intercourse with the
penis. As Chekhov observed, if there is a pistol in the first act, it must go
off in the fifth. Similarly, if a phantom penis haunts your hearth, a virgin
must copulate with it. Because the oracle promised that the fruit of the virgin
and the phantom dick would be an illustrious son, Tarchetius told one of his daughters
to do the deed. But she felt that Tarchetius was abusing his patriarchal powers
here, so she secretly sent a handmaid in her place. When Tarchetius learned who
fucked the phantom phallus, he seized both maidens, and was going to put them
to death when the goddess Hestia appeared to him in a dream and told him no. So
he locked them up and told them to weave a web. When they finished the web, he
would give them in marriage. By day they weaved the web. At night, though,
other maidens, under the King’s orders, unwove it. The handmaid soon showed
that she was pregnant – pregnant with twins. Tarchetius had been forbidden by
the Goddess to kill both of them, but when the handmaiden had the twins,
Tarchetius revisited the divine dream and decided that at least he could kill
the twins, who he entrusted to a certain Teratius. As in James Bond movies, so
in myth: just as the baddie never kills James outright, but always gives orders
to have him killed in some<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>unusual and outrageous
way, so too these oracle-ridden kings have threatening boy-childs taken care of
by henchman, which never tricks the gods and demons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">6. Teratius sounds like a name born out of the name
Tarchetius. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">7. This is the part of the story everyone remembers. “This
man, however, carried them to the river-side and laid them down there. Then a
she-wolf visited the babes and gave them suck, while all sorts of birds brought
morsels of food and put them into their mouths, until a cow-herd spied them,
conquered his amazement, ventured to come to them, and took the children home
with him. Thus they were saved, and when they were grown up, they set upon
Tarchetius and overcame him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At any
rate, this is what a certain Promathion says, who compiled a history of Italy.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">8. But Plutarch gives a longer variant, which he likes
better. The material here is slightly transformed – it has the malleability of
dreams, such dreams as Freud interpreted: the compromise between the fear of
castration and male marvel at his unlikely equipment produces another
quasi-virgin birth, this one happening to a Vestal virgin who evidently
disobeyed the rules. The twins born to this virgin were to be killed, again, by
a servant, who through a bunch of incidences lost the little basket they were in.
“They floated down the river a fairly smooth spot which is now called
Kermalus”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And once again, in this
scrambled egg of a story, body parts get mixed with philology: “Now there was a
wild fig-tree hard by, which they called Ruminalis, either from Romulus, as is
generally thought, or because cud-chewing, or ruminating, animals spent the
noon-tide there for the sake of the shade, or best of all, from the suckling of
the babes there; for the ancient Romans called the teat "ruma," and a
certain goddess, who is thought to preside over the rearing of young children,
is still called Rumilia, in sacrificing to whom no wine is used, and libations
of milk are poured over her victims. 2 Here, then, the babes lay, and the
she-wolf of story here gave them suck..”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">9. But Plutarch is not satisfied yet with this account,
because, frankly, it seems fantastic, and not in that good way that has been
authorized by ancient Greek writers. “But some say that the name of the
children's nurse, by its ambiguity, deflected the story into the fabulous. For
the Latins not only called she-wolves "lupae," but also women of
loose character, and such a woman was the wife of Faustulus, the foster-father
of the infants…”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">10. The founding of Rome, then, involves every kind of
Oedipal confabulation. Perhaps this is appropriate for the violently predatory
state that grew out of phantom penises, handmaidens and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vestal virgins. The imperial question is not:
is the state legitimate? Rather, it is: who is my mother?</span><o:p></o:p></p>Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com4