Mr. Grice's progeny

 The automatic writing of the Surrealists was miles behind the true weirdness of certain crochets of the analytic philosophers in their prime, between the 50s and the 90s. A whole career, back in those glorious days of wine and Sputniks, could be spent pondering some aberrant sentence in English.

It is  this set of “suspect examples” that wash through the papers and (rare) books of Paul Grice.  In Studies in the Ways of Words, his magnum opus, he considers quite a few before getting to the gist of the book.

Among them are phrases involving the English verb try.  If I say, for example, that I tried to write that last sentence, I would score one hundred on the truth meter. I did try. I even succeeded. Which is the oddity of the case. As any parent knows raising any child in the primary school stage, the word trying is often used to denote – something not done. As in, I tried to do my homework! Hearing a child say, I tried to do my homework, one can be dead certain that said homework was not done. But that inference can’t be based on what we know, definitionally, about trying, which is neutral on the success of failure of the thing tried.

Or – to take a “suspect example” that I simply love: what about remember? If I sign a document, I am entirely entitled to say: I remembered my name. But if I did say so, it would make one immediately suspect that the ‘signing the document” scenario is a little off. Am I senile? Have I suffered from amnesia? Nothing in saying I remembered my name tells us, on a semantic level, that such suspicions could be raised. Every time I sign an email I can justly say that I remembered my name; but in saying it, I put into question some linguistic “instinct”. I am giving information that is, though true, inferentially overtrue, so to speak.

Grice, being English, calls this odd. And it isn’t just an anomaly. Rather, it points to a whole structure of inferences built into our discourse, or as he calls it our conversational use of language. These suspect cases are the entering wedge from separating language as the logician conceives it from the ordinary language studied by the socio-linguist: the pragmatics of language.

The key here is that language is used to imply. Grice devoted his philosophy of language to tease out the dimension of implying – of implicature – and to give it a canonical form. “Echoing Kant, I call these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.” All of which are utterly dependent on the big C – circumstances. Scenarios, stories, uses.

The rules that compose these categories are very Britishy, and one might phrase them differently – but they do a good job of making us feel implicature

Take for instance Quantity. “The category of Quantity relates to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the

current purposes of the exchange).

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

 

This then takes care of the suspect example of remembering your name when you sign a document. The excess of information leads to other problems in the big C. It leads, I think, to literature.

I won’t go through Grice’s table. But a remark about implicature is relevant to my larger purpose – which is to link AI to its basis in computing. The table and its maxims are very much structuring principles – and not logical deductions. Implicature seems to resist the computerization that we can accord, say, sorting, or any conventional set based logic.

This gets us to the Large in Large Language Models. The way to force the computerization of implicature, it was seen in the eighties, by people working on Expert systems, was by sheer expansion of the corpus of data. That expansion is, of course, energetically costly. Even as, under the watchful eye of Moore’s law, chip size got smaller, the energy for creating a C large enough to accommodate implicature still seemed pragmatically difficult.

Well, of course, it turned out it is. Which is why we have this amazing energy suck that consists of building data centers to contain the universe of C – which consists of all human representations, audio, scriptorial, pictorial, etc. It is a matter of implicature without experience.

 Can experience be mimicked through recursion? My own feeling is that the universe of C can’t expand that much.  The apocalypse does not, to my mind, mean robot overlords – it means the exhaustion of planetary energy.

And so it goes in our odd faux-Gotterdammerung times.

Les Rita: mon amour

 

Back in the 00s, I needed a lot of cheering up. Coincidentally, Youtube appeared. This expanded the field – of my own musical appreciation, to say the least.

And it is through Youtube that I discovered Les Rita Mistouko. When I put a link up to one of their videos, the friend of my blog, Amie – the late great Amie, whose death was a shock to my system that stayed a shock – turned me on to other songs, and to some history of the group.

Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin were the two elements of that molecule – which was not only music, but dance and spectacle. They fully embraced the cinematic side of the enterprise. Some of their songs were silly – especially when matched up to their video – until, upon repeated listening, the silliness became an initiation to a certain combative aesthetic joy.  Prisoners sing for many reasons; one of them is that the song is not imprisoned. That is combative joy.

Fred Chichin died of cancer. And now Catherine Ringer has died of cancer.

To the me me me writing this, Catherine Ringer represented, in a way, a certain French culture that I rather fetishize. It is the culture of the paysan de Paris – it is a culture of metis, practical jokes, and a tough view of morality, one that emphasizes respect and freedom as a synthesis rather than a hostile truce.

Oh Catherine!

This is a song Amie sent me a link to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUOYXlBEjGI

We the people

or... who is this we, kemosabe?

1. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. Anyone who has ever heard an English person pronounce the word “clever” realizes that the entire feudal order struggles in that word.

One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference … Suppose … a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”

Although it is rare in the scholarship, or even non-existent, to pair Burke with Georges Bataille, there are distinct similarities between Burke’s argument here and Bataille’s in the Bad Part [La Part Maudite] against the notion of utility in political economics – and its leakage into our general consciousness as useful consumers in the social net.

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Burke was clever – but he was no dialectician. Thus, while expelling the theorizer from the social order founded in Delight, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order.

Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systemeticity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself.

2. If, in fact, the social order cannot be founded on utility maximization, then we must – following in Burke and Bataille’s footsteps, or rather leaps – question the notion of a “people”.

I’ve been thinking about the emergence of “we the people” and the nation-state since reading Simon During's thoughts from his Facebook post on the nation as being a sort of concept of the people. For During, the nation, however wooly and ambiguous that notion might be, is a kind of natural kind for the people – for an ethnic group. For what we call the Irish, the French, the Tutsi, the Huron, the Japanese, etc.

I have my doubts about this. Not that history has not shown that, given the right circs, the Czechs in the Austro-Hungarian empire wanted to be an independent nation. And so on. My doubt is that the people preceded the nation. The perhaps most innovative part of the U.S. constitution is its self-address: we the people. A righteous and world-shaking performative, that one!

There is a joke-non-joke in the movie, Little Big Man. The protagonist is adopted into the Cheyenne and learns to call the Cheyenne what they call themselves: human beings. The Tsistsistas. Now translation, as we all know, is freighted with the history of the language into which the terms of the other language are translated. Human beings is not people – although other translators would have used people. Thomas Berger claimed that the novel used a variety of testimonies about Plains Indian life. Among ethnologists the studies of the Northern Ojibwa by A. Irving Hallowell has exerted a lot of influence: Hallowell did not find a term corresponding exactly to “person” among the Ojibwa. He did find a number of terms centering around the vocabulary of powers. The Ojibwa, according to Hallowell, did not group together things outside the human in some macro-group that was conceived of as nature. As Hallowell writes, having no Western sense of “nature”, the Ojibwa gave no credence to what is called, in English, the supernatural. Of course, that a concept doesn’t find its lexical anchor doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist for the speaker. But it doesn’t mean, as well, that we can assume it exists just as it does for the English speaker.

And because the word exists in the English language doesn’t mean that we know what particular English speakers mean by it – and not the small sample who attended philosophy classes in college. If the Cheyenne and Ojibwa have different notions of the person than a sociologist at Harvard might have, we should not extend the notion from our Harvard man to our Spanish smallholder hunting game in 1990. I reference, here, Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, who perhaps I all too often reference when writing about these things – but his one essay about hunting and the personhood of animals is a landmark in my intellectual life. What Dalla Bernardina teased out of his informants was not that the animals were grouped with the machines, a la Descartes, or given some status as useful or non-useful – rather, they were conceived in terms of personhood. They were conceived as in a sense responsible for their deaths, just like people. In fact, the same logic applied that we see every day in human to human violence: the violent often blame their victims for a sentiment of rage that propels the violent act. I will just gesture here to Une Personne pas tout a fait comme les autres, published in 1991, and found here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1991_num_31_120_369443?q=dalla%20Bernardina%20 – an article that should be in the corpus of any philosophy class about personhood.

3. I see that my personage – I’ve become a garrulous old man, an ancient mariner slash blogger – has gone on too long. Which is one of the things wrapped up in personhood – going on too long. The age of chivalry is not dead, as long as geezers such as myself are there to mutter the tale.

Love of brooding: Cioran

In the lexicon of cognitive states, brooding has a distinctly low ranking. We meditate or reflect to achieve illumination; brooding, however, is the prelude to a tantrum. To think means trying to see the object of thought whole – but the brooder is peculiarly averse to letting go of the object of thought, and thus condemns himself to repetition and compulsion. Argument is meant to persuade us to let the personal go, to, in effect, accept the autonomy of discourse. In Socrates’ dialogues, the argument is often treated as though it were some live thing, a spirit, a genius that must be respected. As such, the argument is extra-personal. From this perspective, brooding is a failed, or at the very least, a pariah cognitive act.

Yet, the brooder does have one fierce insight on his side, for the ideology of cognition obscures the moment of surrender, or sacrifice, in the release of the object of thought to the drift of discourse – to “what everybody knows”. The brooder understands that argument’s aspiration to universality is founded on blooding the personal, and that universality operates under the rule of polemos, or war. To surrender a thought is, among other things, to surrender.

Cioran is one of the great brooders. His longer essays can seem wearying because his sentences are so highly worked that they seem not to be building an argument, but to be resisting one. The readerly flow of the essay is impeded by the brilliances of its individual moments. Cioran sometimes seems like one of those brilliant conversationalists who never, actually, converse – in as much as conversation is marked by listening, while the brilliance of the conversationalist seems impervious to hearing. It bears the mark of a certain deafness. And so it is, sometimes, with Cioran, especially in his first texts.

Cioran’s writerly development is that of a long, painful abdication of what seem to be the natural modes of his youth: the harangue and the monologue. To hear the other means, in a sense, letting your style – the verbal front Cioran is so careful to maintain – allow itself a certain vulnerability. Cioran begins to be readable, for just this reason, in The Temptation to Exist. It is here that he actually goes the distance, rather than contenting himself with the pure jab, the shadowboxing of the phrase.

It is here, too, that he takes as one of his objects of thought brooding itself – although he doesn’t label the negative space he opposes to reflection “brooding” as such. What he does is turn upon reflection, in its institutional forms (literature and philosophy) his suspicion that underneath the mask of liberality lurks the spirit of resentment, the eternal return of a grievance. This notion has a long history, and we know its avatars: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in particular. It is the reactionary road to enlightenment.

In Letter on some roadblocks (Lettre sur quelques impasses), Cioran uses a trick that he employs, as well, in later texts to detach himself from the brooder’s solipsism: the essay as a message to some correspondent. To write a letter is not the same as engaging in a conversation, because letters are not subject to the vital element in conversation – interruption. While conversations go by “turns”, the violent can bear them away simply by interrupting, and there is nothing in the rules that forbids this. But letters are, briefly, a space the producer controls. At the same time, the letter must, however grudgingly, acknowledge the addressee.

The impasses or roadblocks here collect around the hated figure of the writer. On the pretence that Cioran is warning his friend against publishing a book, he launches into an invective against the mere writer – the littérateur – which, of course, produces a performative “impass” - since Cioran is very much a writer. This allots him a paradoxical place in his argument. Cioran accepts the cynicism of the paradox – he even exploits it. It is as though he were not so much a writer as an anthropologist carrying out fieldwork on people like Cioran – other writers. And in this guise, he is reporting on their rituals.

What is it that Cioran hates about the writer? It is, I think, the writer’s tendency to be a moral entrepreneur – to wave about his sensitivity to right and wrong as though it were a superiority, a talent. Underneath the moral entrepreneur, Cioran spots the vacuity of the rhetorician:

‘Voltaire was the first litterateur to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method. Before him the writer, happy enough to be next to events, was more modest: doing his job in a limited sector, he followed his path and stuck to it. No journalist, he was most interested in the anecdotal aspect of certain solitudes: his indiscretion was inefficacious.

With our know it all (hableur) things changed. None of the subjects which intrigued his times escaped his sarcasm, his demi-science, his need for noise, his universal vulgarity.Everything was impure with him, except his style…”

Note a key term for Cioran: impurity. Impurity, for Cioran, is a hallmark of liberal enlightenment. To understand this, one has to understand Cioran’s dallying with fascism of the most violent sort in the 30s, and his brief stance as an admirer of Hitler. This, actually, is the center of what Cioran brooded upon his whole life long – his error, here, and his retraction. In the 30s, Cioran was very explicit about his hatred of the Jews, his desire for war, his faith in great and therapeutic violence that would stamp some hierarchy on the people for one thousand years.

Later, in the late thirties in France, he began to change his mind. He did not, as far as I am aware of, collaborate in the forties. Rather, he went over and over the logic of his position, starting from the idea that liberal Europe had suffocated itself under its own dead skin, exiled from the sources of life itself. And yet, he retreated to the liberal side and renounced violence: he renounced life-affirming war, and opted for death-affirming peace. Violence, in Cioran’s view, makes us gigantic, larger than life, and we renounce it at our peril. In History and Utopia he wrote:

“We employ our clearest vigils in taking apart our enemies limb from limb, pulling out their eyes and guts, popping and emptying their veins, crushing and pounding underfoot each of their organs, and leaving them, for charity’s sake, merely the enjoyment of their skeletons.” But, clearly, these are visions that Cioran now does not want to see realized on the streets of the cities (where, as he remarked somewhere else, he is always mildly astonished that everyone is not killing everyone else). However, that renunciation has a price. The price is paid in purity: “Not to venge oneself is to be enchained in the idea of forgiveness, it is to sink into it, get stuck in it, it is to render oneself impure by the hatred one strangles in oneself.”

Thus, the hidden dialectic between, on the one hand, the universal vulgarisers of liberal society, and, on the other hand, the stocking up of resentment and weakness. What distinguished the Fascist principle for Cioran was its recognition of the logic of purity: it advocated violence not for the sake of peace, but because violence was beautiful; bombing was beautiful because it smashed and hurt our enemies down to the last generation; mass murder was beautiful because you could see your true self in the pooled blood of the victims. Cioran, at last, recognized this to be madness, but he did not renounce the logic of purity – rather, he sought a catharsis through rehearsing extreme statements in the paradoxical mode. After getting off to a false start in life, he made false starts a hallmark of his style. And so brooding, in his work, takes the place of reflection, and reflects, pallidly, the dangerous fires that he had longed to light himself – and that then ran so out of control that he was condemned to live in a world that was singed by the destruction they wrought.

Sartre's round trip

  

·

Shared with Public

Every bike rider knows that moment when, pumping the pedals, there is a certain jerking, a certain skip that interrupts the smooth interaction of the teeth of the pedal wheel against the links of the chain. The skipping does not immediately lead to the chain coming off the bike – the teeth catch and disengage in a certain jumpy pattern.

The coordination and possible dis-coordination between the chain and the teeth of the wheel is a metaphor, in Sartre’s essay on Brice Parain, Aller et retour – Round trip. Parain’s magnum opus was published in 1942, Investigations on the Nature and Function of Language; when it was translated into English it was as a thing to fill out French intellectual history, and not to address Anglophile philosophers. But it did make a big impression on 40s intellectuals: both Sartre and Blanchot wrote essays on it, and it was generally part of the discourse in which Bataille, de Beauvoir, Paulhan and others took part. Parain latter became one of the mandarins behind Gallimard's Pleiade editions. He was a bit of a backdoor man, a bit of a celebrity.

The metaphor of the round trip points us to Parain’s uniquely existentialist take on language. While the Vienna school and the Analytics were trying to find the logic that would constitute a Language in which the truth function could be logically interior within propositions – the Tarskian dream of a self-contained language – Parain was fascinated, in Sartre’s phrase, by “the vertiginous sentiment of an inexactness of language.” Parain was a Hegelian, not a Heideggerian, but he too thought that philosophy begins with the way something doesn’t work – the broken tool opens up its “toolness” (“toolness” is so verbally ugly that it makes an aesthetic fit for the notion). Through that break, Parain saw into the problem with treating language monologically – via examples such as formulas and instructions. What pleased Sartre was that Parain saw the subject situated in language – in dialogue.

Sartre, notoriously, neglected the philosophy of language at a time when philosophers were making the linguistic turn like gangbusters. But in the Parain essay, he sketches certain questions that might introduce an existentialist theory of language. In particular, the decalage, the ungearing, between language and experience: “how to insert in language an experience that was made without it?” Of course, all experiences and their names are lifted out of themselves by the generalizing power of language. One can approach this calmly, speculatively, imagining experiments – or one can have this confrontation thrust upon one as the world changes around one. Sartre makes much of Parain as an interwar writer, originally from a peasant family, who was defined by the trenches on one side and the concentration camps and the other. Or, in a less lurid light, as one who saw the collapse of the old order in real time.

Sartre roots the philosophy of language, or the metaphysical need for one, not in science, but in social crisis. In doing so, he overdoes Parain’s peasant roots – as I have learned from other sources. But he puts his fingers on something that the language turn philosophers have ignored by turning to the “timeless” methodology of science: the language turn comes out of an existential social situation, one in which words and silences are undergoing a systematic connotative change. The word war itself, a defining word, becomes at the same time an ambiguous one: was the interwar period really a peace? In 1944, are the Allies really allied? In 1949, when the essay was included in Situations, what was war and what was peace in Europe, or Asia, or Africa?

There’s a bit of Round trip that is less about language’s failure in general than about the crisis and responses to the crisis in the interwar period. Parain’s choice was of a certain kind of silence, which Sartre calls infrasilence – a silence that surround the word with its occasion, with its painfulness, its cruelty. The kind of silence that is described, in a story, as “stunned”. Sartre is still placing Parain in the generation that came out of WWI looking for a solution – in Parain’s case, finding it in communism for a period of his life. There were also the surrealists and the “revolution in poetic language”, to borrow Kristeva’s phrase. Sartre was thinking of how the twenties and thirties could give us both Breton and the PCF, Bataille and the ultra-right – like other French intellectuals of the 1940s, chewing over the mystery of France’s defeat.

“All those destroyers that he had followed for an instant are possessed, in one way or another, by the demiurgic, Nietzschean pride in this one thing, that they all believed in the plasticity of human nature. If they burned the old man, it was to hasten the coming of a new man. There was the surrealist man, the gidean man, the Marxist man, who all wait for us on the horizon.It was a matter of both unmasking and fabricating at the same time. In one way the future is empty, and noone could prevision it; in another sense the future exists more than the present; the inebriation of all these smasher-uppers was about constructing a world which they wouldn’t know and wouldn’t recognize once it was built; the joy was in the risk, in not knowing what they were making, the bitter joy of telling oneself that we were to lead people to the threshold of the promised land when one would remain, on that threshold, and regard them all going away. These sentiments were completely foreign to Parain. He had no eyes for the future, he didn’t believe in it. If he spoke of it, it was to imagine a world which unmade itself; here was a man who had, when all is said and done, lost himself; his theory of language must lead him, had led him for a moment to the idea of the plasticity of man: change the words, change the person. But nothing was, in reality, more distant from his deepest reflexion. The image that was most deeply embedded in his memory was of the natural order. The return of the seasons and the birds, the growth of plants and children, the fixed order of the stars and the planets. This was the order he opposed in secret to the factitious order of discourse. To this order, the beasts submit; and also man, that beast who speaks.”

Sartre understood this, while at the same time developing a theory of liberty that involved the most radical plasticity. I like the contradiction, or rather, the stitching. The metaphysical stitching.

on reading Christopher Sorrentino's Now Beacon Now Sea

 1. Memoir is not so much a genre as a congery of genres that include essays, autobiography, autofiction and other circus animals. Memoir is, itself, popular in the hinterlands but not so much in the academic canon, where it is difficult to locate its coordinates, its trajectoy, its landings.

Embed the thing in history. That's always been my gambit. Like this:

Andre Chastel, the great art historian, once suggested that Petrarch found, in St. Augustine’s Confessions, a portal to a new sensibility:

“This avowed taste for Saint Augustine, less the theologian than the man, is a great teaching: the example of the Confessions shows the passage from the life of antiquity to that of medieval Christianity – yet Petrarch betrays its spirit, since he uses it as an aid to define a troubled state corresponding to Saint Augustine’s when he had not yet discovered the peace of Christ. The imitation of Saint Augustine led Petrarch to unmake, more or less consciously, what his model had made: he was attracted in St. Augustine to the sickness rather than the cure.”

One wonders whether Castel is moved, perhaps unconsciously, by Michelet’s The Witch here.

In The Witch, Michelet presents that figure of the victim of medieval Christianity, the woman, in herself, as effecting, through her unconscious representative, the Witch, as affecting a diabolical reading backwards, against the grain (as for instance in reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards) in order to go forwards – indeed, in order to leap over the present.

Chastel was writing in 1953, when the place of Petrarch in the cultural history of modernity was canonically to have represented a new spirit. Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux had been made into a parable of the individualism of the Renaissance by Burkhardt, and that image was very strong in the first half of the twentieth century.

An ideogram: the cultural history moves forward by way of exempla.

2. Memoir, memory, life. These are the good fairies, or bad witches, that attend the “recounting” that is memoir’s excuse and pattern. I like the notion that memory, instead of showing how things were, is an exercise in “undoing” – a sort of psychoanalytical walkabout. To undo what has come since – this seems to distinguish a certain angry energy in the memoir, even as the traditional memoirist is recalling no matter how turbulent a past from a supposedly peaceful, or at least recollective present.

These are notes I keep as I read Christopher Sorrentino’s excellent memoir of his mother, Now Beacon Now Sea – and not his well known father, Gilbert Sorrentino. Christopher Sorrentino, rather like Noah Baumbach, was raised in the heart of the New York intellectual scene – born in 1963, and patched and pealed in an odd experiment in bohemian welfare, Westbeth, an apartment house located in the Greenwich village. Before the Sorrentinos moved to Westbeth, Gilbert and his wife Vivian and Christopher lived in the dangerous Tompkins Park area. The memoir is addressed to his mother – addressed to his readers, to himself, but mostly to his mother, his dead mother. To undo death is a witch’s work.

The book begins, then, with his mother dead. And in particular, his mother’s decaying corpse. The beginning is overwhelming, and would definitely sink a lesser work.

“I spoke to my mother for the last time on May 27, 2017. Sometime within the next few days, she died. I found her on June 15. The sight of a decaying corpse is horrifying, but it’s also a wondrous thing. My mother’s body lay on its back on her bed, one leg crooked at the knee, identical to the position in which I usually fall asleep. One small, blackened hand lay across the abdomen. The face was a nightmare, although her hair was still lustrous, the corpse wearing it down in a way I hadn’t seen my mother wear it in years. It framed her skull on the pillow. The body seemed simultaneously collapsed and inflated. Maggots were busy at work. Her expensive mattress was ruined. The oxygen machine was still grinding away. The smell was overpowering; I felt that I deserved it. But abruptly, without thinking about it, I cut off my examination. I closed the bedroom door on her; I closed it as if trying to shut out something that threatened to engulf me. That was the last time I saw her.”

He was, indeed, shutting out something that engulfed him. By presenting his mother in the harshest possible light, Sorrentino accuses her – and himself. How could he not have known? How could he have known and started with this paragraph, this smell of a fact?

3. There are many memoirs of NYC bohemia. Most are deflating. But bohemia refuses to be deflated. Rather like adolescence itself, we can leave it, we can hate it, we can try to forget it – but we carry it nonetheless. Anybody who writes carries some bit of bohemia, willingly or unwillingly.

Vivian or Vicky Sorrentino was most unwilling, and this memoir is an act of undoing her son’s resistance or absence from his mother. A corpse is an accusatory thing, which is why humans have always surrounded it with some kind of cult. Sorrentino’s New York is very much of a piece with Baumbach’s. It was a hard place to be a kid, since the kid position is competed for by a hundred adults, all of whom were “older then, but are younger than that now. “ That Ur-60s thought.

Well no. Older just gets to be older. You can’t skip over the second law of thermodynamics, which is infinitely sneakier than the mere human product. You can try, though. You can go back to the Saint Augustine of the stolen apples, rather than the redeemed and terrible saint. But no memoir yet has overcome that stone cold barrier. Sorrentino’s gains its pathos, its depth, by understanding the inherent futility, now, of understanding, investigating, somehow recognizing his mother then. That’s the cosmic sink we are in. In for good

An old fear

 

 Does the old serpent look back on its life of shed skins and… sigh?

No herpetologist has ever heard a snake sigh – no doubt for sound biological reasons having to do with snake anatomy. But the sighing old serpent has a cartoonish plausibility, and takes its place in my imagination along with all the other cartoons.  I’m that serpent, and those shed skins are mine, sort of.

Which is a serpentine way to get to this: when I was a child, it seemed that children were always finding dead bodies. Murdered people lying  sprawled on building sites. Horribly mutilated victims in forests. Skeletons of long ago suicided men in creek beds. Criminal statistics in backyards, or near picnic sites (the parents dozing, outstretched on the picnic table benches, the Colonel’s bucket attracting flies, the children playing hide and seek, screaming with laughter, Dad’s face concealed under the tent of the newspaper). The child who, secreted behind the bush and all attentive to IT as IT stalks by, becoming focused on two bare and twisted feet sticking up on the ground just a couple feet from his crouch and gingerly lifting the leafage to behold what the feet belonged to. The disposal problem, it seemed, was continually in the news. The tv news. The tv shows, less graphic then, still showed killers hiding their victims, which implied that somebody was going to find those victims. This bugged me. I thought that I would, inevitably, as a child of the crime waves of the twentieth century, stumble across a corpse somewhere, someday. And horror films in the seventies became rather monomaniacally insistent on kids, teens at least, discovering cadavers.

I look back at this fear and am a bit surprised that it was never actualized. From my first steps to my now, more than 500,000 Americans have been murdered. Yet I have managed to scrape by without ever being in proximity to a bloody hair or twisted face. It is a big country, is all I can say. I long ago shed that fear, and its cousins (the fear of ghosts, the fear of some terrifying face staring at me from a window at night, the fear of confronting this or that bully, etc.). The old fears go where all my shed skins go – into my dreams.

And this must end with: a sigh.

The anti-charlatan charlatan

 

… jede Stunde mit dem letzten Schlag von tausend unschuldigen Herzen durch die Welt dröhnen müsste – “every hour must roar throughout the world with the last beats of a thousand innocent hearts.”

Optimist: But all wars have ended with peace.

Faultfinder: Not this one. This one has not taken place on the surface of life… no, it has raged inside life itself. The front has been extended to the whole country. And there it will stay. And this changed life, if there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is perishing and we won’t know it. Everything was yesterday and will be forgotten; no one will see today or be afraid of tomorrow. They will forget that the war was lost, forget they began it, foret they fought it. That is why the war won’t end.
 Ou
- Karl Kraus, taken from Calasso’s essay, The Perpetual War.

Calasso’s essay on Kraus focuses on an experience that Calasso himself, as well as most of his readers – all, now, surely – never had: Kraus’s readings. In particular, Kraus’s reading of his giant play, The Last Days of Mankind. The reading of this play, in absolute opposition to Austro-Hungary’s participation in the war and, more generally, to the war itself was an act that Calosso, using as his witness Elias Canetti, imagines like this:

“Outside there was still the war, and in the darkness of the hall, this tiny man with “a face so mobile that its couldn’t be pinpointed, penetrating and exotic, like the face of an animal, but a new, a different face, an unfamiliar one.”

Kraus was something we see in all the great polemicists: he was an anti-charlatan charlatan. Mimicry was the weapon, incitement by quotation was the point. I have long thought, since the Bush decade, of Kraus as a reference point to understand the moronic adventures of the U.S. in the 21^st century. The U.S. cam into the new millenium in the  most favorable circumstances possible. It could have continued to be at peace. It could have repaired and social and physical infrastructure. It could have made the necessary changes to repair the evident obsolescence of its constitutional order.

Of course, none of that happened. We are creeping out of this year with the U.S. government owing 40 trillion dollars, engaged on a smaller scale with an even stupider war than the unnecessary wars it engaged in in the 00s. Our constitutional order is now a bloody abortion, done to death by a lynch mob Supreme Court, and allowed to do so by an inane, inert, and senile legislature. Our economy is dominated by the illmeaning and cretinous offspring of the “third way”, our plutocrats, who make our 19^th century Robber Barons look cultivated and gentle by contrast. We have seen the government, aided and abetted by corporate media, shit all over the proudest product of 20^th century America, the civil rights movements. The climate is ruined, and not a hand has been raised to stop that foreseeable event.

Even the golden age of TV seems to be over.

Yet I’ve grown suspicious that my reference, my admiration for “prophetic denunciation’ is simply false consciousness patting itself on the back. When the poetry of indignation holds itself unaccountable for the predictable effects of total negation – depression, listlessness, quietism – then it is bad poetry. Poetry should not be employed to promote a cowed attitude towards life and energy. Those who pronounce the end of the world – or the end of this or that – are too slick, and too self-pleased with their disease. Ending is either an existential experience or another cause for making a pronunciamento, for self-advertisement. The end-makers are, really, all in the great muddle with the rest of us.

Note to self.

A gnomic note

Comparison: an old and reliable enlightenment tool. The philosophes loved the whole idea of comparison, for it seemed to magically produce progress in ideas. Ride the comparison into the modern was a kind of program. See, for instance, how the savages in America had myths and practices startlingly like the ancient Greeks. Ask yourself if progress hadn't made the contemporary European (which consisted of a handful of European bourgois urban intellectuals and forgot the peasant and artisan masses) the crown of civilization.

Unfortunately, comparison, as the elementary student of dialectics knows, simply fossilizes the embryo idea – leaving it forever in a pre-natal state unless it is vigorously moved forward via the forceps of antithesis and inversion. Thus, the revelatory smack of Diderot's The Nephew of Rameau.

However, under the shadow of that dialectic move, comparison still holds a great deal of anarchic power – satirical power. The enlightenment prehended the limits and fate of comparison in the preference given to satire. Gullivers travels is the satiric odyssey of civilization - a predecessor of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, but one stripped of pathos.

The expression you can't compare x to y is inherently reactionary, supposing a natural and forbidding hierarchy. You can compare the lillies of the field to Solomon, or to an extermination camp. You can compare my digestion to the big bang.

Comparison is free. It is an existential property of the universe. It is impossible to imagine comparison without the universe - and vice versa. A universe without comparisons is not thiinkable by the monkey we are - or even thinkable.

Notes on an Irish vacation

 

- On the last day here,  in the sauna of Dublin’s Boddington Hotel, to be exact, I saw, or perhaps the sensory word I’m looking for is heard, the origin of Joyce’s Dubliners. Not denying the mythic pattern, the Irish and indeed world history, the immense theological knowledge, the intertextuality that Joyce could pull out of his ass by the yardful – to all of that I tip my hat, of course. But the birth is from Irish small talk, of which I was a privileged witness sitting there absorbing the heat on a bench above two types – a good looking gent in his fifties and a pretty woman who in the course of conversation revealed her age to be 58. It was hard to say whether these two knew each other extensively or had met for some convention at the hotel, but the man was sharing his tale of stomach upset and ulcer that had put him off his feed for who knows how long and the woman was full of commiseration, for hadn’t she too had a sickness in her 51^st to 54^th years? And he was on about how the pills worked but he didn’t want to get addicted, and she was on about how you can’t let things go to fast, for they will go fast, and the man said he couldn’t even fucking take a walk and his dad had said the same thing about time, said it to him when his dad was sixty, and the woman instanced a recent news item, even from yesterday, the whole family in that terrible car crash, out for a vacation they were, and the man had heard of it, and the woman said they’ll never get back their life.

And I had to think of the two Dubliners who bought tickets to go to the top of the Nelson pillar of accursed memory. Or of Stephen Daedalus’s extensive and crumbled jottings. Notes to self.

- In William Butler Yeats’s poem In Memory of Major Robert Gregory there is a verse that goes:

“And then I think of old George Pollexfen,

In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline…”

 

I quote this quite dispassionately, but I have memories mixed with it – walking down the slope of Church Street in Clarkston Georgia as a high school student whose sense of poetry and the larger life I thought I could never live on roads like that of Church Street in a suburban Atlanta was stirred by Yeats so that these verses were more than verses, once, but the smuggled in sawblade by which I’d saw through the bars of the prison – a heated adolescent idea, but mine once, then.

In Yeats’s biography, he mentions,  briefly, that George Pollexfen was a mystic, an uncle, and that he lived in Ballina. I have now been to Ballina and it is Church Street in Clarkston with uglier buildings and a Papa Johns that serves fries with its Pizza. It is true that “Many ingenious lovely things are gone/ That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude”, but lets not get carried away with Greek ivories- there’s always Church Street in Clarkston Georgia, in a point of view that has entirely dwindled, in a man that has waxed and waned and seen Ballina on a gloomy drizzly day.

Of course, very likely the Anglo-Irish relatives of Yeats’s were acquainted more with the Knox-Gore family, who lived rather eccentrically in a modest castle and a fairy wood, the Belleek forest, outside  Ballina. The Knox-Gores were great ones for horseflesh, and so was Pollexfen.

- The impressive mountain peak above us, which in the morning was wreathed with clouds, is called Croag Patrick, a name that our tongues play with a bit: Croag, Craig. It comes up from the Clewe bay, which made Westport a considerable export import competitor of Galway and Sligo at one point, until the bay’s comparative shallowness made for problems with the modern deeper freightors. All that is knowledge from the cruise, which we took three days after this ascent I’m talking about.

The Rough Guide says of the peak’s trail: “… taking an average of 3 and ½ hours return, is easy to follow, though steep in places – you will need good walking shoes and a stick.” True enough, although it would have been nice to add that it isn’t the steepness as much as the way the path up to the top is firstly dirt, scree, and some medium boulders, and secondly something like oyster shell, easy to tread, and for the last third is a winding nightmare of jagged broken boulders and small ones that seem deliberately designed to impede the walker and to send signals to the knees and legs that are received even days afterwards.

Hazel sticks are definitely a necessity, even as we are summing these things up from the parking lot and having no idea of what the path is like. So we get them, two euros a piece at the kiosk, and start off in high spirits. The clouds lift, the views spread out below us, and we talk of what the guide book says – that pilgrims make the trek on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July. Barefoot! That sounds like with a little tricky footing and sneaks we ought to do nicely.

Up we tread. Up we plod. We make our way up the path of dirt, scree, small boulders, and we see the hills on either side of us in panoramascope all the way to the Ocean and the islands in the bay, and we think that this is what we came for. We picnic on some boulders a third of the way up. Tuna sandwiches. Apples. Blueberries. Water.

At this point, unbeknownst to us, we were merely a ticklish distance along – a fourth of the way, maybe. The mile and a half to come would not be so easily covered. Oh, we were walking over the mountain, but, as we saw in retrospect, the mountain was also walking over us. I myself began to doubt of everything when, in the end, I was going up the craggy, helixy curves that were in steep ascent, in a sheer grade of crazy rockiness, to the grassy couple acres of the summit. I was being passed by young hikers chatting and picking their way without much effort, and by more middle aged and elder types who encouraged each other – we were strangers all but bound by the journey, I suppose. It was nice to see bare chested rather athletic looking men getting all deflated as the climb went on, and sitting down, finally, tacitly admitting that no, they were not going to bull their way up. And myself, I thought, what the fuck am I doing here? I knew the top would not be worth this much strain on the old body.

The mountain was definitely walking over me. Later, we made our way back to Enniscrone and had a quiet spaghetti dinner and exhaustion ran around the table.

- So many ruined fortresses, abbies, houses. So many cows and sheep and their odor in the wind. Particularly recommend Easky for its cliffs, and the cliffs near Ceid Fields, although the latter are not for wandering around on a windy day. Every day there is, of course, windy, so there is that.

Other notes will come as I think of them, my comrádaí!

 

 

 

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 On the West Irish coast

Ocean, cold, farmers’ suicides

Enter as spirits the grudging blood

In its system ticking forward

To no purpose or landing

That she can see.

Unless – the girl in the crone’s cast skin

- she dreams of happiness,

of honey on good cottage bread

or the first can in the pub.

Never the thick tongue in her ear,

Never the man’s flanking motion

His barnyard antics.

Which they called love

In the pig ignorance and trickery of back then.

Unless the ocean, the cold,

The self inflicted escapees

Gives you, in the clearing morning

A sum, a summoning, salt sufficient

In the headland gusts.

- Karen Chamisso

The prisoner of cool, or down among the zeros

 

1. I’ve always believed that you will only see a culture in its totality, see it thoroughly, sees its wonders and damage, when you go through the cracks.

I don’t know where this belief comes from. Perhaps it is a vestige of the New Testament I was taught in Sunday School. It severely underestimates the effects of going through the cracks – this I know from experience. Most often, instead of trying to understand the culture you spend that experience counting your pennies and looking for cheap intoxicants, Going through the cracks is terrifying, and terror is not conducive to collecting the forces of your spirit and understanding the mechanics of the great wheel of fortune that is crushing your bones. Splinter and crack, splinter and crack.

Nevertheless, the theory is not wholly flawed. A culture’s vision of itself is manufactured by those paid to manufacture such visions – follow the money and you will soon find that the mass of our images and understandings attach to the advertisement for reality these people manufacture, often in all sincerity. This is the vision from the gated community, from the Eloi and their children. It has long been stuffed down my throat good and proper. I’m no longer the Morlock I once was, but I know I am made, essentially, of mud, and am not going to rise much higher. The Eloi will forever be out of my grasp.

Politically, we are supposed to believe that these issues can be understood by a simple dualism between left and right. I lost that illusion in the 00s, at least. To understand the culture when you are going through the cracks, your best guide is to follow your instinct and think of the culture as a many-splendored thing, for which you have to make up categories in your own home or hole.

What struck me in the Bush era wass how, instead of a left opposition, in America, you have an opposition that is the prisoner of cool. Cool has taken the place of ‘respectability’ as the ‘moral civilization’ in which all move in lockstep, even those who have some contempt for the images projected by the Eloi.

2. It is a long, strange trip for cool. At one point, in the fifties, cool came in a binary: its opposite was square. Square, now, is one of those words that can only be quoted, never said straight. It is all too reference laden with a certain ersatz Hollywood swinging culture – a culture that seems more improbable than the culture of Edwardian England or the fictional Mad Max cultures of the apocalypse.

Square, of course, stood in for the respectable back in the early era of cool – which would make cool its negation. And it is in this vein that the change from respectability was actually interpreted. Robert Erwin, in a 1983 essay, What Happened to Respectability, assessed the changes of the 60s and 70s in terms of a wholesale decline in the forms of the culture that used to add up to respectability, and the triumph of the informal – a dialectic that he captures by contrasting Nixon and Saturday Night Live. Incredibly enough, in 1983 Erwin could plausibly present the rather pallid vaudeville of Saturday Night Live as a sort of revolutionary symbol of a change in mass behavior.

”The degree to which the ideal [of respectability] was internalized also indicates its strength. Richard Nixon seems classic as well as villainous when he wears a suit, pressed and buttoned, to board a private airplane. Elliott Gould seems only show-biz carbonated when, smiling sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, he tells a national television audience that he is glad to host “Saturday Night Live” because the progam, in his words, “has balls.” You cannot imagine, Class of 1975, what a fright, embarrassment and hostility Gould’s breaking of a taboo would have triggered in the heyday of respectability. Millions upon millions of ‘dent’ people in 1860 or 1960 went from one year to the next rarely speaking, hearing or reading such words in the open.”

Erwin, I think, mistakes a shifting of exterior symbols for a change in substance. What he was watching, I think, was the absorption of cool into a new domain of servitude – the servitude inherent in the service economy – rather than a true Bastille moment. Gould’s audience, perhaps, could not imagine a figure like Father Coughlin, in the 30s, casually talking down Jews on national radio time, or the kind of dialect humor that was omnipresent in the Gilded Age and right up to the 1950s. This is not to say that the shifting of terms was insignificant – it is merely to say that in the shift from formal to informal, from an ideal of respectability to an ideal of cool, the contradiction traversed was shallow.

3. The January 1, 1951 of Commentary carried an article by Anatole Broyard entitled KEEP COOL, MAN: The Negro Rejection of Jazz. In the corner of the article, there was a little bio of Broyard: “Anatole Broyard, anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world, here lays open the deeper meaning of the injuction to “be cool, man” now current in Harlem music-making.” The ambiguity of being the anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world trailed Broyard around throughout his life. He was a pale skinned man, apparently, and though he did not call himself white, there was a rumor that he ‘passed’ as white. Race, that chopping block in American culture! Broyard was, it is said, the figure that Phillip Roth referenced with his character Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. Roth himself denied it, in a strange “letter” to Wikipedia, where this rumor was referred to as fact.

Whether Broyard presented himself as black – whatever that means – or had some responsibility to do so is wrapped up in the white supremacist subtext of the American dream: one that it is difficult to drain out of that dream without popping it entirely. However it is certain that he wrote a lot about black culture for magazines like Commentary, who accepted him as a “guide” – setting up one of those informant-explorer relationships that always come to a bad end, unless you have the genius to understand how to make the joke and slip the yoke, like Ralph Ellison.

Broyard’s essay is notable for appearing about the time that the notion of “cool” was slipping into the vocabulary of a certain white subculture, after circulating in a black sub-culture. For Broyard, the concept marks a certain loss of innocence. Broyard’s essay supposes, again and again, an equation between negro and primitive – meaning, positively, an innocent autonomy, and meaning, negatively, a certain essentialist imprisonment in which “civilization” is seen as the corruption of this innocence. The boundary at which innocence trucks with corruption is music – particularly jazz.

“In this period, Negro popular culture began to incorporate into its body proper certain elements of white society, drawn for the most part from the less favored ethnic and economic groups… Their incorporation as spectator, participant and devotee served to further split the consciousness of Negro popular culture. The Negro became increasingly aware of his role as creator and performer. He himself however was still the subject matter of his performance. His music – in lyrics and feeling – remained autobiographical and continued to express his reactions to his situation.”

4. The fifties was the heyday of the Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship – you can call it the Partisan Review effect, or at least I will call it that, ho ho. It turns up all over as the master trope to understand American society, and particularly, for obvious reasons, America’s system of apartheid. This is the context in which music and civil rights and oppressions background the formation of an existential attitude. That attitude takes the term “cool” as its own master-trope. Jazz, in Broyard’s view, is terminally anchored to “hotness”, which in turn has become, after the moment of spectatorship by a curious white sub-class – one that is marked as deviant by its very interest in black culture – a property lost, an innocence that could no longer be sustained. In the moment of that gaze, hotness turns to jive.

There is a lot of futurity in Broyard’s essay, themes that continue – through Mailer’s The White Negro – into the sixties and into the Black Power movement itself. My view is that the imprisoning idea of “cool” comes out of this image of an innocence that is corrupted in the moment of its consumption, which is less history than a nostalgic substitute for history. Here's Broyard pursuing his thesis: “Bebop, which began in the mid-40s, was the expression of the Negro’s search for new material in this period. It was the improvised interpretation of experience of the Negro musician as immigrant in white society. Because he was a foreigner, it was a kind of gibberish.”

The idea that he was a “foreigner” is a product less of the real economic and social situation of apartheid – for this foreigner was, actually, a laborer and consumer in the system, and had made the system work from the very beginning not as an immigrant but as a kidnapped hostage – than of the magic of the image of the master-slave relationship, which seemed to explain so much about racism while relying on highly abstracted essential types that could not explain the reality of a person like, say, Anatole Broyard.

5. So much for cool’s background. The problem with the history of concepts is the same problem that the cowboy faces on the plain – how to move the doggies forward. In other words, how did cool transform from an existential attitude into an imprisoning trivialization of affect? Which is, you might say, sharp eyed reader, a transformation of Broyard’s myth – the fall from innocence leading us to the corruption of the present. The story surely has to do with the attractiveness of “cool” in a postwar consumer society, in which “like” and “dislike”, those responses to the handcrafted, are elevated quantitatively to responses to the mass produced. The time to like, that is, the education of the sensibility that creates a patterned liking and disliking that signifies something about character, becomes something hard to resource. Where is one going to get this time, and how is one going to afford that education? Out of this dilemma, I think, comes the solution imposed by the ”cool”. Imported from the “stranger”, the black entertainer/artist, it goes out there as a short-cut to the sentimental education that is overwhelmed by consumer culture. Which Broyard lays out in racial terms that are pretty marvelously put.

“The circular quality of cool music is unmistakable. The orchestrations and the solos turn back on themselves as a result of the “cool” musician’s lack of interest in the autobiographical continuities which served as program, mood or configurations of jazz, jump or wing. The circle is the most self-contained form in nature, and thus, in cool music, nothing obtrudes, the effect is zero. The supporters of this music might argue that all music- i.e. “classical” “serious, nonfolk music – is tautological or equal only to itself, but their own habit of interpreting cool music and describing the musicians’ attitudes in psychological terms would contradict this. In other words, this zero is attitudinal, not an aesthetic effect. It is the cool man’s answer to the difficult algebraic problems of the marginal man’s place in society.”

The algebraic problems! Back, again, to the square, although this time we pair it with the circle, or the “attitudinal zero.” The zero degree of attitude in this 50s essay makes the hop jump and skipping mind advert to the zero degree of writing, which appeared in 1953. Barthes intro begins, rather intriguingly, as a sort of cousin to Broyard’s notion of be-bop as “gibberish”.

“Hebert, the revolutionary, never began a number of his new-sheet, Le Pere Duchene, without introducing a sprinkling of obscenities. These improprieties had no real meaning, but they had significance. In what way? In that they expressed a whole revolutionary situation. Now here is an example of a mode of writing whose function is no longer communication or expression, but the imposition of something beyond language, which is both History and the stand we take to it.”

The problem of cool as a prison is that it sheds history for a private mythology. Although it is not so private as all that. It totems and taboos are not DIY, but are all elements in the floating world in which the cool in solitary exists, or seeks to. Cool sets out to be the product of the experience of the cracks, I think, but its indifference speaks to another order of experience, a dreamt – of order of celebrity, of an indifference displayed to the cameras. The imagined cameras.