IT's new post

I don't know
Why you've gotta be so undemanding...




IT has continued her series on porno. You can also see the beginning of this series here and another post here and her piece about pornographic classifications here. There’s also a sexpol piece here which I think may be the best in the whole series.

Here are some comments:

Since I am trying to write a review of a book that distinguishes three regimes of seeing in science, I am, perhaps, hypersensitive to issues of representation and the ‘training’ of the people who represent and the audiences they represent to. The technique of the self, as Foucault calls it.

There is a pattern I’ve noticed on theory blogs of taking films or music – usually not novels, poetry or paintings – and subjecting them to theoretical glosses with an entire and easy assumption of the epistemological superiority of the theorist. It is as if the theorist’s position is not only self explanatory, but that the theorist knows better than the work of art itself. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is why pop cultural products of a certain kind are so popular among the blogs. It is easy to present oneself as superior in every way to, say, 300 – much harder to do that when analyzing, say, Proust.

Myself, I think even the lowliest work of art – a student film, Anal Cheerleaders 5 – retains a certain autonomy. In practical terms, that means that the thing retains the power to touch. The moment of touching can be a moment of sheer disgust. It can be a moment of rapture. But its distinguishing characteristic is that it is not in the hands of the spectator. For a fleeting instant, the audience is not superior to the work. How to explain this? There’s a famous anecdote about Lenin, recorded by Gorki. Gorki had taken Lenin to hear a performance of music. Lenin said, afterwards, that he would like to listen to Beethoven’s Apassionata every day, since it made him ‘think with pride – perhaps it is naïve of me – what marvelous things us humans can do – but then, according to Gorki, “screwing up his eyes and smiling, he [Lenin] added, rather sadly: But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, make you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke any one’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against any one. Hm, Hm, our duty is infernally hard!”

Lenin had a very sharp sense for moments of surrender.

I think IT is more aware of the resistance of the artwork than other theory bloggers. And, by chosing to write about film porno, she has chosen to comment about a genre that implicates the spectator to an obvious and structurally expected extent. Just as you go to cook books to cook, not to marvel at the recipes - or most of us do - you go to porn to jack off, or as part of some foreplay ritual. So if you go as a critic, you have to self reflect a bit, have to explain your epistemological position a bit, have to discard the easy assumption of the theorist’s superiority. Like advertising, porno exploits the aesthetic moment of touch – exploits it like a pickpocket – and forces the critic to acknowledge it.

Anyway, there’s a theme in IT’s work, as she compares vintage porn to contemporary stuff, that goes back to her first posts. Her latest post puts it this way: “Contemporary porn is infinitely segregated. The atomisation of the 1950s filters through to a kind of obsession with taxonomy. The sheer hard work of contemporary porn, and its obsession with taxonomy, informs you that, without delusion, sex is just like everything else – grinding, relentless, boring (albeit multiply boring).”

It is the tie, here, between sex, work and boredom where I feel that the nature of porno as representation – as a work of art – is forgotten. Boredom floats, here, between the spectator and the actors. Is it that the porno actors are bored? Is it that the spectator finds them boring? I think that the line being blurred for someone as sharp as IT clues us into porn as a popular art. Popular arts are intimate like this, they work towards that blurring of the line. Few people, watching MacBeth, say, are thinking well, that is not how I would do it if I wanted to be King of Scotland. But if you watch a tv soap – if you’ve watched people watching a tv soap – you might actually talk back to the tube. “Don’t do it!’ “Oh, she’s going to be in trouble now.” “Oh oh, here comes X.” The idea that these are actors slips away, and with it Diderot’s Paradox of the Actor. Or, rather, one of the choices in Diderot’s essay – the actor as an instrument of spontaneity – is made, is systematically made, in the most unspontaneous of art forms, film.

I think this says something about the development of porn that forms the major theme in IT’s post. Although tv, film, music of a certain sort are parts of ‘popular culture’, I think they present themselves as intimate culture – and here I’ll just wildly speculate for a moment. When, in the seventies, the adult movie industry took off, porn was shown on the movie screen, in the heroic proportions that are natural to all things shown on the movie screen. But that posed the problem that Gulliver confronted in Brobdignag:

“That which gave me most Uneasiness among these Maids of Honour, when my Nurse carried me to visit them, was to see them use me without any manner of Ceremony, like a Creature who had no sort of Consequence. For, they would strip themselves to the Skin, and put on their Smocks in my Presence, while I was placed on their Toylet directly before their naked Bodies, which, I am sure, to me was very far from being a tempting Sight, or from giving me any other emotions than those of Horror and Disgust. Their Skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and Hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads, to say nothing further concerning the rest of their Persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by to discharge what they had drunk, to the Quantity of at least two Hogsheads, in a Vessel that held above three Tuns. The handsomest among these Maids of Honour, a pleasant frolicksome Girl of Sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples, with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me for not being over particular.”

The audience in the adult theater was composed of people who were a bit bigger than a Splacknuck – which was Gulliver’s size – but they were still gazing at men with dicks the length of a man’s arm, approaching pussies as tall and broad as toasters. Porn (to continue my wild speculation) can’t stand this magnification. The more natural home for the stuff is the video, the tv or computer screen (although with tv screens getting bigger and bigger, who knows how this will upset the collective sensorium). I would be surprised if IT had actually ever seen a porno on the full screen – you have to be at least my age to have had that access, when adult theaters were springing up all over. Brobdignagian porn is mostly a thing of the past. As T.S. Eliot might have said, Splacknucks can’t bear too much hyper-reality. If my speculation is in the ballpark of reality, it would also help explain why, as porno shrank and became more commonplace, it also evoked less heated attempts to suppress it. The violence of gangbangs is rather magnified when the gangbangers are fifteen feet tall - and in fact the violent choreography of almost all sex is brought out at that range. Whereas porn among the lilliputians, which is what we have now, has to use intense close up to get the same sensorial effects.

I'll have more thoughts about boredom as an initiatory effect later.

News from the Imbecile Republic

And soft, what light breaks through yonder moronic inferno! Although weep, children, we should weep for a kingdom that is overthrown, here, a true Caliban's paradise of private penitentiaries, a newe way and discoverie of cleaning up foul poverty by painlessly tricking poor people through the strategic placement of vicious FBI footpads until lo, they’ve gathered into their nets a quantity of em, all saying good things about Al Qabaedola, asking for shriner hats and submachine guns, and assuring their faithful contacts and secret Judases that whatever that city is that the Sears building is located in, they will be creeping in it like the biggest hardon, blowing up this and blowing up that.

Oh, but I can’t fool myself. LI admits to being such a Islamofascista that I would like to see the FBI agents who contrived this fired and tried themselves, and on up until we catch some of the Scooters in the Justice department. But this is a dream for another time and another nation.

Making the rich less rich is not socialism

I’ve become a reader of Floyd Norris’ blog over at the NYT. I’ve noticed, with some amusement, that any time a vague and distant hint arises that the rich in America might be oh, oh, slightly too… rich, the comments section is reliably flooded by screeds against socialism and for the American way.

It makes me long for a snappy way to point out that capitalism was not abolished in the U.S. in the fifties, nor was the Reagan tax cut on the wealthiest the second coming of Adam Smith in the eighties. What is funny about the rabid defense of the wealthy is that I imagine it often comes from the non-wealthy. It isn’t like billionaires are trolling blogs. But what they are defending is, of course, absolutely against their interests. It is the great American paradox: the almost saintly disinterestedness of the American householder in defense of systematic greed.

There are a number of ways to redistribute wealth down. Imagine, for instance, that unions had been strong enough, back in the eighties, to peg earnings to the ratio between upper management and the lowest paid functionaries in a company. Back then, the ratio was about 70 to 1 – today, it averages something like 300 to 1. If the unions had done this and the CEO level had succeeded in extorting the pay packages they had today, we would be living in a utopia in which the merest entry level receptionist would be taking home 150-200 thou. This would be excellent – except of course that corporations would no longer make profits. Instead, they’d be pouring all their cash into paying their workforce. Still, at the 70 to 1 ratio, upper management’s efforts to increase their compensation packets would have significantly pulled the earnings up of the entire workforce.

Unfortunately, when you don’t have powerful unions, you have to rely on the countervailing powers of the state. You have to work, then, to raise the taxation on the upper tier considerably. You have to do this not only because you need to pay for public investments, but because there is a macro good to great income equality. For one thing, it discourages economic activity that is, in reality, mere churning. Looking at the mortgage mess, one can see more and more clearly how the fantastic, Pirenesian structure of false economic activity has worked since 2001. It has allocated money not to the most productive, but to the most churnful. For another thing, more equality now means more equality latter. As the gap widens between the resources of the rich and the not-rich, it becomes exactly what we socially reproduce. Those non-rich who, for instance, decided that the death tax, otherwise know as the estate tax, was just terribly unfair to their children actually screwed their children terribly, because they are not leaving the kids fortunes, whereas the fortunate few are – thus aggravating the already unfair structure that separates rich from non-rich children. The cost of abolishing the estate tax is borne by the non-rich in such areas as trying to get their kids into top schools and the like.

But what most impresses me about expropriating a good share of the wealth of the wealthy is its environmental impact. As anybody with the eyes to see can see, the last twenty years have been years of great GDP growth in many countries. In fact, the whole Tom Friedman-esque economy is oriented towards steroiding GDP. Why? Because if you are going to have increasing inequality, growth is the way that the middle income sector – the vastly more numerous non-rich – can, at least, maintain their lifestyles. But GDP growth could also be called the Diminishing Environmental Return. DER is the natural result of overexploiting a system that is limited in many ways. Put up a zillion towers for cell phones, and you can say bye bye to songbird populations – make your McMansions of tropical wood, and strew them with the kind of wiring that gives you 24/7 instaconnectoinstamaticinstatubelivegirlsxxxxpronomatic action, and you can say bye bye to the environment of Sumatra. Down the intertubes it goes. It is an incredible waste of resources, which is the total result of the elite decision to grossly exacerbate the wealthiest’s share of the wealth. With a greater equality of income, of course, GDP doesn’t have to grow as fast. The drift of our current society into endless war, endless stupidity, an endlessly degraded public sector, the unwinding of all those hard fought democratic gains of the last one hundred years, is the direct result of a simple arithmetic ratio. To repair this – to go back to the managed capitalism, as Kuttner calls it, of the past – isn’t socialism – it is the self interest of the vast mass of American citizens.

From My Third Life

LI has a book column to write about two books: Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, and Trying Leviathan, by D. Graham Burnett.

Daston and Galison mount a pretty impressive marshalling of evidence of the way, in a number of sciences over the past two hundred years, we can see three distinct regimes of representation. The first regime, truth to nature, or the search for types and ideals, G. and D. date to the eighteenth century – the second regime, objectivity, or representation that strives to eliminate any subjective bias, emerges, in their scheme, in the nineteenth century – and the third regime, trained judgment, which organizes ‘mechanically objective’ representations in terms of trends, thus reintroducing a form of consensus subjectivity, emerges in the twentieth century. Periodization doesn’t imply that this is a history of zero sum games - the rise of one regime doesn’t entail the extinction of a formerly dominant regime. However, it does imply something more interesting: the rise of different techniques of becoming a scientist. One casually speaks of the scientist as an observer, but in fact, observation is a trained act, and the training is structured around what, exactly, it means to see a phenomenon, what one is looking for, how one proves that what one sees connects to a given theory.

Obviously, I will have to refine all of this in the sugar mill of reviewing. In general, though, this is what the book is about.

All of which is an excuse to quote Marcel Schwob.

Marcel Schwob is not a name to conjure with. For the most part, even your most bookish literatus has forgotten Schwob. But he has interesting fans – among them, Borges, Bolano, and Calasso. Which is a lineage as exciting to me as the descent of Bonnie Prince Charles from James II was to your average raving Highland Scot. I’d fight under their colors.

Schwob was a fin de siecle writer. Like Mallarme, he knew English and translated from that language. He was Robert Louis Stevenson’s friend, but he also knew Jarry – Ubu Roi is dedicated to him. Myself, I’d read his name in The Banquet Years, I believe, but had never had the urge to reach for Schwob until I read Calasso’s brief essay about Imaginary Lives. Calasso claims that “the flame of this book is not yet extinguished. Today, when many who read Borges are discovering the subtlest, most vertiginous magical charm of the fantastic and a certain secret mathematics of the story, they will recognize a master in Schwob and a model of this literature in his book. … Marcel Schwob… invented a new genre of adventure literature which sought no immediate contact with reality, but rather took the byways of philology and mystification…

So I searched on the Intertubes, and of course found a site dedicated to Schwob and – hurray! – a decent archive of his texts, including Imaginary Lives. The book consists of a preface on the biographer’s art and twenty two brief lives, from Empedocles to Burke and Hare. Reading the preface, I came upon the following passage that … floored me. There are bits of literature that stick in my brain. They become a sort of third life to me – after my waking life and my dreaming life. And I know exactly when something is destined for that third life.

Here’s the quote:

History books remain silent on these things. In the rude collection of materials that are furnished by testimonies, there are not many singular and inimitable breaks. Ancient biographies in particular are miserly with them. Valuing only the public life or the grammar, they transmit to us the discourses and the titles of the books of great men. It is Aristophones himself who gives us the joy of knowing that he was bald, and if the pug nose of Socrates hadn’t served as a touchstone of literary comparisons, if his habit of walking about barefoot hadn’t been part of his system of philosophy by showing contempt for the body, there would only have been conserved of him for us his moral interrogatories. Suetonius’ gossip’s tales are only hateful polemics. The good genius of Plutarch sometimes made an artist out of him: but he did not know how to understand the essence of his art, snce he imagined ‘parallels’ – as if two men, properly described in all their details, could resemble one another! One is reduced to consulting Athanasius, Aulus Gellus, scoliasts, and Diogenes Laertes, who thought he was composing a kind of history of philosophy.

The sentiment of the individual was more developed in modern times. The work of Boswell would have been perfect if he hadn’t judged it necessary to cite Johnson’s correspondence and his digressions on books. Aubrey’s Eminent Lives are more satisfying. Aubrey had, without a doubt, the instinct of biography. How aggravating that the style of this excellent antiquarian is not on the same level as his conception! His book would have been the eternal recreation of the select few. Aubrey never felt the need to establish a relationship between individual details and general ideas. It was enough for him that others sealed the celebrity of men of whom he took an interest. Most the time, one doesn’t know if one is dealing with a mathematician or a statesman, a poet or a watchmaker. But each of them had his unique trait, which distinguished them forever amongst mankind.

The painter Hokusaï hoped to get to the ideal of his art by the time he was one hundred years old. At this moment, he said, every point, every connecting line traced by his brush would be alive. By alive, we understand him to mean: individual. Nothing is more similar than points and lines: geometry is founded on this postulate. Hokusai’s perfect art required that nothing be more different.”

This story about Hokusaï is ingenious and – as it happens – gives me an angle to look at the story of objectivity as told by Daston and Galison. For it is in the space of that reversal of geometry itself – from a science depending on the similarity of lines and points to the perfect art in which each line and point is alive – that one finds the anguish in the scientific drama of objectivity. For to represent, say, crystallized urinary deposits just as they are seen under the microscope, in their one time only state, is eventually to succeed from the whole purpose of scientific representation. One can’t build a science on the one time only – without regularities the urinary deposit, the snowflake, the species of woodpecker, the star, the canals of Mars, become a hyperclear orgy of distinctness. And in this orgy there is no master of ceremonies – even the stick that would point out the details is an insufferable interference with the phenomenon as it is. Integrity, not aura, is the scientist’s pole star, but integrity, too, falls victim (to its own weird success) in the age of mechanical reproduction.

The Path to Happiness

Well, LI, for one, was glad to see that bipartisanship returned to D.C. this weekend. Democrats and Republicans have coalesced around the torture issue – they like it. They want more of it. It is the kind of thing that Nancy Pelosi would like to have more of, except that she doesn’t remember if she was told of it at all, poor dear. Amnesia is a terrible thing. Maybe she would like to have less of it. She was for it until she was against it.

Of course, at LI, we are so, so proud of our American torturers. The problem, as we see it, is lack of recognition. Why not: an American torturers medal? Rather like the Medal of Freedom, but ballsier.

We’ve been reading That Inferno to get into the torturing mood. Five women who were tortured at the EMSA – the Naval Mechanics school – between 77 and 81 began to get together in the nineties to talk.

Here’s a bit in the introduction that Pelosi would just swoon over. Perhaps, after the voting for the the 200 billion in Iraq that the Dems have pushed through Congress, no strings attached, they could set aside a billion here or there for Blackwater, our national resource when it comes to all things murderous. Imagine how this would fight terrorism!

“There was a door where someone had written “The Path to Happiness”. Behind that door was the torture chamber: electic shock machine, an iron band of a bed connected to a 220 volt machine, an electrode that went from zero to 70 volts, chairs, presses, and all kinds of instruments….
Have you ever been shocked by a refrigerator or another electric appliance? Add a hundred and multiply it by a thousand. That is what a person feels when he is tortured, a person who might be guilty or might not. … I’ll tell you about a case, a seventeen year old girl named Graciela Rossi Estrada. She was a sad looing girl. Because they needed more hands, I was asked to be present. It began with the simple methods of the average villain in a grade B police movie: cigarette butts, poking her, pulling her hair, beatings, pinchings. As they apparently didn’t get what they wanted to hear, they started with the electricity. After a half hour of receiving blows and electric shocks, the girl fainted. THey they took her very delicately by the hair and legs and heaved her into a cell, into a pool of water so she’d swell up. Four or five hourse later she was in terrible shape from swelling and they brought her back to the torture chamber. Then she’d sign anything – that she killed Kennedy or she foght in the Battle of Waterloo. That’s why I saw the facts gotten from torture weren’t real most of the time: they were just used to justify arresing a person…
One of the lively systems [that the camp doctor] invented to torture a pregantn woman was with a spoon. They put a spoon or a metallic into the vagina until it touched the fetus. Then they gave it 220. They shocked the fetus.”

Now, I’m not sure if we could go for shocking the fetus. Only if it doesn’t lead to an abortion – after all, we don’t want the value voter to be turned away! They are crucial to getting a real progressive majority in Congress.

But the electricity that they used in Argentina – trained, often, by experts from the U.S. at the School for the Americas in Columbus, Georgia – does not express the kind of perky, innovative tortures that the CIA and its allies in the Middle East are all about. I interviewed a Lebanese author, Elias Khoury, about his novel, Yalo, a couple of weeks ago. An excellent novel, and one that Democrats might well read so they can suggest new and innovative torture techniques that we need in order to stay free and keep our credit cards going. Here’s a simple but sure way to make sure you get the info you need. You simply strip your man – your inhuman terrorist, a real beast. Now, strap his arms. Usualy this method requires a couple of men. And produce a simple coke bottle. The method is called “sitting on the throne.” Lower your man onto the bottle until his anus is pressed against the top of it. Keep lowering. Hey, we aren’t monsters, of course. The man has a fair chance of surviving if the coke bottle goes into the anus without breaking. Of course, most of the time, alas, all that weight can crack the neck, and so as the coke bottle goes in, there are the rough edges that abrade and tear tissue. But such is life, and I’m sure if this was seen by Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller, they asked many questions to make sure that the torturers did not – and this is very important – use any ethnic slurs while tearing through the anal tissue of the torture ‘victim’ – as some people call obvious terrorists. Because slurring people is unprofessional, and we don’t want to get into hate crime territory, do we? We want our Medal of Torture recipients to be clean living and clean speaking. No jokes about getting it up the butt, even if they are irresistibly funny.

‘I was naked, my eyes were blindfolded, my hands were tied, and no fewer than ten people were yelling at me. “Bitch”! they yelled. “You have to collaborate,” and they asked me about my friend Patricia. Meanwhile, another one stroked my hari, took my hand, and whispered in my ear, “Stay calm, and if you collaborate, nothing will happen to you.” It was a truly demonic scene. There were yells, insults, obscenities. At one point, one of the guys lifted my mask and another one lowered his pants. I was naked and tied up. He brought his penis close to me, while the others threatened, “We’re going to go at you one by one, bitch.” The truth is that I would have preferred an actual rape. I would have taken it as something more human, more comprehensible than the torture. At one pont during the session, the power went off … And I… when the power went off, I laughed.
Elisa: Because they couldn’t use the electric prod on you.
Miriam: The situation struck me as funny. The guys said, “Oh, this is fucked up!” and they brought in a portable, battyer-powered electic prod that I didn’t even know existed. When I screamed, they said, ‘come on, you dumb ass, cut the crap. This is nothing. You got off easy because the power went off.” I don’t know whether the other one was more potent. I was lying on a wooden table, and later they took me somewhere else, where there was an elastic belt and a metal cot, and they also wet me down to help conduct the electricity. And after the electric prod in my womb, in my vagina, in my eyes, on my gums, one of the most vivid memories is of how afraid I was they would torture me again.”

See how it works? After a while, everything you ever imagined comes true. It is the path to happiness, and apparently Congress and the Coup group in the White House went hopping merrily down it. I wonder if we are ever going to come back?

Reaction vs. the System, round one

Walter Benjamin begins his 1931 essay on German fascism with a quote from one of his favorite reactionary writers:

“Léon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet and himself an important writer, as well as a leader of France’s Royalist party, once gave a report in his Action Française on the Salon d’Automobile – a report that concluded, in perhaps somewhat different words, with the equation: L’automobile, c’est la guerre.”

I’ve looked around for Daudet’s article. I haven’t found it. However, I understand why Benjamin, a collector of lines – of those moments in which thought seems to be utterly transformed into its primal element shock, as though an oracle had spoken – remembered Daudet’s report. It casts a prescient light over the system of which the automobile was as impressive a product as, say, some fossil by which a paleontologist maps, in shorthand, a geological epoch. The creature that left that fossil was at the convergence of conditions both sheerly geological and evolutionary; the automobile was at the convergence of conditions of production, changes wrought by the industrial system in the habits of the citizens of developed economies, and the underlying, subdued violence that existed as the cost for these changes and these lifestyles. Contrast Daudet’s sentence with the lines in Apollinaire’s Zone, which begins:

“À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l'air d'être anciennes.”

(In the end you are tired of this ancient world
Shepherdess, o Eiffel Tower the troop of bridges bleats this morning
You are finished with living in greek and roman antiquity
Here even the automobiles have an ancient air).

Chasing the pessimistic/reactionary tradition through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century is a rather mixed experience. On the one hand, the reactionary writers are great deliverers of thunderbolts. On the other hand, when they actually make a case for themselves, the eternal return of the ancien regime would require, even in their own eyes, the same kind of massive upheaval of the social order which is exactly their constant accusation against liberalism. In Maistre’s case, the moment of the reactionary revolution is taken care of, in a bizarre way, by Napoleon. Maistre’s opinion that the Bourbons could not re-establish themselves is consistent with seeing Napoleon as fulfilling, unconsciously, the task of creating the social conditions in which the Bourbons can return. But of course, the return of the Bourbons, however sweet was the black terror of the reactionary years from 1815 to 1830, proved in the end to be a disappointment, the gravestone over the ancien regime rather than its glorious resurrection. Even in Maistre, the contrast between mealy mouthed piety and the continuous stream of contempt seems to be doing more than stylistic work – it seems to be a reflection of the politics of resentment, a politics that takes the failure of its goal for granted, and contents itself with an infinite hunt for scapegoats. Leon Daudet was, in a sense, the endpoint of this tradition – marked, more genially, by Chesterton and Belloc in Britain. Daudet’s most famous book, the Stupid Nineteenth Century, begins with a recounting of a quarrel Daudet had with his great friend, the anti-semitic pamphleteer, Dumont, over a slap delivered by a rightwing parliamentarian to the head of the division, as Daudet puts it, of ‘sneaks’ during some session of the Chamber of Deputies. The face that received that slap was in its sixties, and Dumont disapproved – much to Daudet’s chagrin. Daudet was for slaps, for riots, for rallying rightwing collegians to storm surrealist openings and the like. In fact, the mixture of gesture and ink was, spiritually, close to the surrealists themselves, who did like a good riot or a resounding slap.

It is also close in spirit to the transformation of reactionary views into a kind of Punch and Judy show – it drains the politics from them in favor of the political gesture. The frustration of advocating for a total and unlikely change is relieved in a series of ever more violent tantrums. This direction of political action is typical of a reactionary program that existed in contradiction to the technoculture that it could only accept in terms of war. In terms, that is, of a systematic violence that would drain from politics anything but gesture, making politics into an endless series of heroic gestures – which is how the conservative revolutionaries gradually became fascists. It was a collusion of temperaments.
The turn to war counters the insistence, after the French Revolution, on the political goal of happiness, and it begins with Maistre. But why did the reactionary, pessimistic tradition turn to violence in the first place? The secret source of that turn is revealed by another French reactionary, Leon Bloy, who wrote an interesting section on the devil, in one of his baffling books, Le révélateur du globe: Christophe Colomb et sa béatification future. Bloy claims that Satan, the real Satan, doesn’t leer out at us from Dante, or from Faust:

“The notion of the devil is, of all modern things, the one that most lacks depth from having become literary. Certainly the demon of most poets wouldn’t even frighten children. I only know of one poetic Satan who is truly terrible. It is Baudelaire’s, precisely because he is sacrilege. All the others, including Dante’s, leave our souls tranquil and their threats make us shrug our shoulders, the slightly literary shoulders of the girls of the catechism of perseverance. But the true Satan which one know longer knows, the Satan of theology and of the mystic saints – the antagonist of the Woman and the tempter of Jesus – Christ – he is so monstrous that, if it were permitted to that monster to show himself as he is, in the supernatural nudity of non-love, the human rance and animality entire would scream once and fall dead…
The greatest force of Satan is the Irrevocable. The word fatalism, invented by the pride of so-called philosophers among men, is only an obscure translation of this horrifying attribute of the Prince of the Wicked and the Emperor of the Captives. God gards for himself his Providence, his Justice, his Mercy, and above all, the Right of Grace which is like the seal where his omnipotent Sovereignty is imprinted. He thus keeps as well the Irrevocability of Joy and leaves to Satan the irrevocability of Despair. The terrifying pale gate of the great American poet is opened on the two gulfs offered to our liberty.”

Bloy a couple of pages later accords Satan such power over human history – particularly of the modern era – that the reader is forced to read that Irrevocability back into human history, particularly of the modern era. Unconsciously, the pessimists premises do homage to the scope and scale of the great transformation – the industrial system and the market society become, in this perspective, supernatural events. Or, to a non-Christian eye, natural events – events that have the force that natural things once had – the weather, the fertility of the land, the changes of season, those markers of peasant life, are all radically humanized in the industrial system, where the coordinates of time are defined in terms of business cycles, working days, and the brief ages of technological innovation – the age of steam, the age of the auto, etc.

Take a ch ch ch chance...

Birthday – take a ch-ch-ch-chance!

As in my birthday, today. I’m dedicating the day to myself. Well, in reality, I’m editing a paper on Ottoman feminism to keep the pack of wolves from the door. But I’d like to be chasing some Weimar babe around a futuristic landscape.
Oh well. But it’s a paycheck, Jack.

Although North doesn’t like the lipsynching here, this is still going to be the song for me today.

Everybody dance now!

The LOL era and the Iran war rollout

Sometimes, LI thinks we should brag about our foreign policy prescience. Before the invasion of Iraq, we foretold the insurgency, and the expense – although, admittedly, we underestimated the latter. Similarly, since 2004, we have been predicting that … there would be no war between the U.S. and Iran. Although in 2004, we considered it possible that the U.S. would bomb Iran, much as Reagan bombed Libya – a sole sortee, for advertising purposes only – by 2005 it was pretty clear this wasn’t going to happen.

The reason why ties into the domestic reasons for invading Iraq, which should never be forgotten. Bush, on 9/11, was, by all rights, a washed up president. Not only had he been elevated to office in the most bizarre coup since Rutherford Hayes agreed to abandon African Americans and cede the Civil War to the South in 1876, but he had obviously and spectacularly failed to protect the country, and was subject to embarrassing panic attacks. It only got worse as his Defense Department did what it could to help Osama bin Laden escape into Pakistan, practically buying him and his entourage a one way ticket. At the same time, Bush had managed to take the amount of money accumulated from the regressive FICA tax since 1985 and distribute it almost completely to the wealthiest people in the U.S. – a two trillion dollar gift to the upper one percentile. In return for which, the wealthiest staged a nice collapsing bubble as the stock market, which had boomed due to a tissue of fraudulent accounting practices and unregulated flows of hedge money, came back into line with reality.

What was needed was a war like Bush’s Daddy’s war, so the war they wanted when they came in was ginned up a little earlier than I image they were planning – given their overt grossness, I imagine Rove had planned the war for December, 2003, so they could have the victory march sometime in spring and enjoy the spike in the Prez’s popularity. Daddy Warbucks Bush had, after all, not benefited from his war.

Well, they succeeded in getting the second term, and of course it blew up in their faces, since this is a bunch that has never had a more than third rate idea. What they weren’t counting on was the fact that their war, which they wanted to be a little thing, a model war for a bunch of others, turned out to be an extensive, expensive, and ultimately wildly unpopular thing. And while certain aspects of it have, admittedly, succeeded – the price of oil, for instance, is now firmly stationed at three times the price of oil during the Clinton administration, a source of quiet pride to the Petro-Gun Club, Bush’s true milieu – still, there was a small political problem with squeezing the Red State Muzhik for more of his currency. If there is one thing that muzhik likes, it is a big, gas guzzling truck upon which one can affix one’s Bush Cheney sticker. But if the price at the pump shoots up to, say, four dollars a gallon, even the core of Bush believers would begin to melt. The thing that doomed Carter was not his ‘weakness’, as per the right, but the price of things – which are equivalent to Virgil’s the tears of things – they are the sacred signs by which we organize our rituals.

I have thought, for a long time, that this, and this only, was the real restraint on the sweet toothed crowd at the White House. Still, I think the attack on Iran has been a lure for the Bush people. Since we know that they have had the NIE estimate for a year, we can guess that it was repressed in order that the Cheneyites might have their say. The papers have gone along for the ride, with the Post making egregious references to Iran in its reports on Iraq, never missing a chance to blame Iran for IED deaths, and of course never mentioning the role Saudi Arabia played in making sure the Sunni insurgents were armed and manned and out there killing the Yankees, pour encourager les autres. Also, the ride up to ninety nine dollars per barrel was too good to miss. If Exxon doesn’t vote Bush a lifetime sinecure when he finally stumbles out of the white house, well, it will just show a shocking decline in gratitude in the corporate world.

So things have worked out happily enough for the scoundrels who rule us. The Petro Gun club needs, as we creep towards actually appeasement, just like Chamberlain back in 1938, to keep the noise machine going. I was happy to see that the Washington Post pitched in with one of their exemplary editorials, in which one half truth is added to another as part of a proof that half truths add up to big lies: and so of course they read the NIE report as saying that Iran is going to be arming missiles with nuclear tips and firing off like drunk gremlins any day now. More significant, however, is the Kagan op ed piece sending up a white flag. What happens now is anybody’s guess. I suppose the law of incompetence eventually had to strike at the one thing the Bushies do best: the war rollout.

CAN A MONSTER BE HAPPY?

According to Albert Sorel, Napoleon read Maistre’s Considerations sur France in 1797, when he was in Milan. At this point, Napoleon had already planned his coup against the Directory. As Sorel puts it, “a little book may have already revealed the secret his future.” Although Maistre was a violent anti-Bonapartist – he is probably the source for some of the more pointed remarks in War and Peace, for of course Maistre was serving as the King of Sardinia's ambassador in Moscow when Napoleon attacked Russia - Sorel sees a community of … superstition between Napoleon, the man who said “I depend on events, I wait for everything from their issue” and the writer who wrote, “The Revolution led men more than men led the Revolution”.

Sorel’s idea is that what struck Buonoparte in Milan was a metaphysic that Buonaparte was to embody all the way up to 1815:

“The war made the Republic live, the peace will make it die… The French always succeed in war under a firm government that has the spirit to despise them in praising them and in throwing them on the enemy like shells, all the while promising them epitaphs in the newspapers..” War, besides, is a divine right, it is sacred. ‘There is only violence in the universe.” “The true fruits of human nature, the great enterprises, the high conceptions, the male virtues, all depend on the state of war. All the great men… are born in the midst of political commotions … Blood is the food of that plant that we call genius.”

It is for the celebration of war and execution, for a universe of violence, or – as Maistre says in Evenings in St. Petersburg – a society of punishment, ever more punishment, that Maistre achieved a sort of louche fame. He was the satanic Catholic, at least if we through him through the eyes of Baudelaire, who made as much a cult of him as he did of Sade. And face it, Maistre is the strangest apologist Christianity ever had – the only apologist who tried, as much as he could, to squeeze the love out of the thing as a sort of Protestant heresy. Catholicism has spawned some very wacked defenders – Leon Bloy comes to mind. But Maistre was the first who put together the anti-modernist program of the Church with a notion that is surprisingly close to the Terror – rejecting the social contract for the bonds of a sacred, nation building violence, with the preferred instrument of that violence being a legitimate succession of kings. In place of a creation that is, ultimately, bound together by the force of affection, he put a world under the judgment of a God whose memory of the human crimes is segmented into the very way human societies are laid out. We suffer, we war, we execute because we were born to others who were also born, and somewhere along that line there is a crime which is humanly inexpiable. In that Christianity without love, birth becomes the one undeniable thing a person can be accused of. What can’t be denied is certain, and on certainty we can build a science – but this political science will not be like that of the ideologues of the revolution.

Sainte Beuve, in a famous causerie on Maistre, pointed out that, for all his extremism, Maistre was actually a moderate among the ancien regime exiles, and seemed fascinated by Buonoparte. He saw in Buonoparte what was fatally lacking in the Bourbons – “if the house of Bourbon is decisively proscribed, it is good that government consolidate itself in France… it is good that a new race begins a legitimate succession, this one or that one, it doesn’t matter. I like Bonaparte king more than simply conqueror.”

So, of course, Maistre is not Sade, who might have reversed that last sentence. While Maitre’s God works miracles of violence that one can only wonder at, Maistre retains, at the risk of contradiction, all the old Catholic pieties. This is what gives the Soirees such a strange tone – some of it is just boring and second hand homily, but just as you start to get sleepy Maistre will develop some point until it becomes a monstrosity.

Indeed, the whole thing starts off as a question of monsters. The first pages of the Soirees are weirdly reminiscent of the first pages of Heart of Darkness. Three men are on a sloop, the sun is going down, they are all breathing in the sea and the sunset, they are all men of position and gravity, and one of them chances to make a strange remark – except this remark does not become an extended anecdote, as in Heart of Darkness.

“As our sloop gained a distance from the shore, the song of the rowers and the confused noise of the city insensibly faded. The sun was setting on the horizon; brilliant clouds gave off a soft light, a gilded semi-day that is impossible to paint, and that I have never seen anywhere else. The light and the shadows seemed to mix and extend to form a transparent veil which then covered the countryside.”

Then one of the three men on the sloop expresses the following thought:
‘I wish I could see, on the barque we are standing on, one of those perverse men, born for the misfortune of society; one of those monsters who fatigue this very earth.

‘And what would you do, if you please, if you had him here,’ (his two friends spoke up at once. “I would ask him if this night appeared as beautiful to him as it does to us.”

Quickly the dialogue develops the theme of the happiness of the wicked and the misfortune of the good – but the Count, the man representing de Maistre, who dominates the chapter, turns this question into something exterior – that is, he unconsciously follows in the traces of the Enlightenment philosophes he deplored, and takes happiness to be the description of social arrangements rather than inner psychological states. Later, of course, another Russian in St. Petersburg, Doestoevsky, will question that move.

I’m not, of course, concerned with all of Maistre’s program – it is the happiness of monsters that truly does interest me. But I should say something about Maistre’s effect – I think this is as important as his ideas. That suave but frightful loosening of the bonds of decorum is the predecessor of Baudelaire’s famous shock aesthetic. The line of descent, here, goes through Baudelaire and Barby D’auberville to Leon Bloy, who sums up the aesthetic strategy pretty well when he reflects on his own pretty horrible book, Salvation from the Jews:

This book, conceived in the sense of the oracles of scription, had to go, under pain of nothingness, to the edge of the bottom of things. I thus had to adopt the method recommended by saint Thomas Aquinas, which consists of exhausting the objection, first, before concluding. Excellent method, of a great philosophical faithfulness, but which caused me to be misprisioned (me fit malvenir) by the same people that I was claiming to honor as no Christian has honored them, I believe, for nineteen hundred centuries. One only looked at my premises in neglecting to observe that their violence was calculated to give all its force to my conclusion.”

some self erasing advice for Dems

LI was talking with our friend and far flung correspondent, Mr. T., on the phone last week. We both were yammering on about what is happening in the economy, and Mr. T. said something like, what we need now is another trillion dollar line of credit.

Which is very true. Leading me to this brief post, in which LI gives unsolicited advice to the Democratic Presidential candidates.

Look, next year will suck for the economy. It will suck so bad that the majority of Americans (for whom the economy has sucked for some time but who read in the paper that the economy is going terrifically well, and thus suffer from cognitive dissonance) are going to be reading in the paper that the economy sucks. It will be that rare alignment of existence and propaganda – an opportunity not to be missed!

So, here’s what you do. You make a speech saying what everybody knows – that the price of oil has tripled since we invaded Iraq because the oil dealers have a pretty shrewd idea that we are going to be tripping over the supply line for some time to come. But, you say, I am going to bring the price of oil down. How, you ask – easy. I am going to make peace with Iran, which will easily remove many of the artificial roadblocks to the exploration and exploitation of Iranian oil. That’s all. On the news – if, that is, you are a credible candidate – oil futures will fall. This is almost a no brainer play. And when they fall, you make a second speech pointing out that they fell because of your first speech. And so on – the point being that if you want those votes in the methamphetamine states where Jesus is almost king, just press on those gas prices. They’ll holy roll themselves your way.

On the other hand, doing this won’t make the petro-gun club up in D.C. happy, and really, politics in this country is about keeping the petro-gun club in D.C. happy. So maybe you shouldn’t do it. After all, even if you are defeated, you’ll get big hugs from the liberal side, which has learned to embrace rejection, using Dr. Scruggs patented Ignatz luv conditioning method - as Dr. Scruggs says, it only means luv if it hurts! - and you can always become a big wheel in one of those private equity corporations. And God wants you to be rich. Fuck it. Ignore this advice.

echoes of the britney age

NARVIK, Norway Nov. 30 — At this time of year, the sun does not rise at all this far north of the Arctic Circle. But Karen Margrethe Kuvaas says she has not been able to sleep well for days.

What is keeping her awake are the far-reaching ripple effects of the troubled housing market in sunny Florida, California and other parts of the United States.
Ms. Kuvaas is the mayor of Narvik, a remote seaport where the season’s perpetual gloom deepened even further in recent days after news that the town — along with three other Norwegian municipalities — had lost about $64 million, and potentially much more, in complex securities investments that went sour.

One of those apocryphal Lenin quotes that are passed around by rightwingers goes: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” I doubt Lenin said this, however: he was smart enough to know that capitalists did a bang up job both of selling rope to each other and hanging each other already. Some extra twine shipped to the Soviets wasn't going to make a hell of a lotta difference.

At one time, however, the good old liberal state actually regulated the rope selling. We tend to forget that as recently as the seventies, the whole structure of financial speculation that we take as normal was, well, illegal. Up until the seventies, the institutional memory of what caused the Great Crash was still vivid. The conservative contention that what caused the great crash was too much government intervention with the natural processes of the laissez faire economy was treated with the contempt it deserved, since it was obvious then - and it might be put down as one of Jane Austin's truth universally to be observed - that the leaking of confidence from a market dependent on credit will crush the 'efficient mechanisms' that are in place to prevent panic with the same blind rush for the door that animates a crowd in a burning movie theater. In Edward Chancellor’s wonderful Devil Take the Hindmost: a history of financial speculation, he quotes an essay by F. Scott Fizgerald, Echoes from the Jazz Age, which we might want to pull out again as we watch the Bush regime employ the time tested variants used by every coup state to ward off the effect of economic misrule that has been its raison d’etre – in the same way that the raison d’etre of a pirate ship is pillage.

The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age. There was the phse of the necking parties, the Leopold-Loeb murder (I remember the time my wife was arrested on the Queensborough Bridge on the suspicion of being the “Bob-haired Bandit”) and the John Held Clothes. In the second phase such phenomena as sex and murder became more mature, if much more conventional. Middle age must be served and pajamas came to the beach to save fat thighs and flabby calves from competition with the one-piece bathing-suit. Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. Everybody was at scratch now. Let’s go ---

‘But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.

It ended two years ago, because the utter confidence that was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow – the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.”

Myself, I have a soft spot in my heart for the twenties – in fact, if you got me down in a wrestling match, sat on my chest, and forced me to say when I thought civilization had peaked, I’d opt for the twenties. Our own age – the Britney age – doesn’t have quite that insouciance of the grand dukes, even if we are fed a daily diet of the casualness of chorus girls.

Chancellor’s book traces the revival of the liberal economic theory – or the theory of the expensive orgies – through some amazing stories. None is, perhaps, as amazing as the story of Milton Friedman. In 1960, Friedman wrote an essay, In Defense of Destabilizing Speculation, which suggested that speculation would self-organize its own constraints due to the fact that speculations that were inefficient would lose money to people who had bet against those speculations. This is a variant of the efficient markets theory, which should really be renamed the “trust a drunk to get home’ theory. As we’ve seen over the last two weeks, the Stock market does operate on information – it just doesn’t distinguish between good and bad information. If you have ever tried, when extremely high, to sing a Neil Young song with other people who are also extremely high, you’ll have a wonderful model for explaining market activity – this should certainly be looked into by economists of the Chicago school. The probability of not realizing that you are out of tune, when high, singing songs that might have originally been sung out of tune, to boot, is very much like a market that supposedly exists to allocate, in the most efficient way possible, capital to industry.

So, here’s a golden moment from Chancellor’s book.

In 1967, Milton Friedman attempted to bet against the sterling price to Britain’s forced devaluation, but was turned down by the Chicago banks on the grounds that his action would encourage speculation. Afterwards, Friedman related his frustrating experience in print. His article attracted the attention of Leo Melamed, president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange … the smaller of the city’s two agriculture futures markets. …

After the collapse of Bretton Woods, Melamed approached Friedman and asked him to write a paper justifying the creation of a market for currency futures. The professor obliged, demanding a payment of $5,000 for his services (he is reported as saying, I’m a capitalist. Remember that). Friedman had long argued against capital controls, in favor of floating exchange rates and the free movement of capital. In his paper for Melamed, entitled “the Need for Futures Markets in Foreign Currencies”, he claimed that currency futures would have a stabilizing effect on exchange rates and encourage the development “of other financial activities in this country.” Melamed’s money was well spent. Permission was granted by the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve to establish the new International Money Market at the Merc, which opened in May, 1972. The financial revolution had begun.”

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by
year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It’s Britney, bitch

wife beaters and amazon hooligans

Tracing the rise of the culture of happiness, one can too easily forget the reality of, one can too easily become nostalgic for, the sweetness of life it replaced – the ancien regime, panned with a camera lens suitably vaselined over.

But this nostalgia is shot through with bad faith. Although I am determined to show the price we have paid for the triumph of happiness, I want to make sure to make clear that I am not tracing some vast mistake or horror. It is the dialectician’s curse to be mealy mouthed – but too bad. I’m not going to try to avoid that fate by creating a bunch of rigid oppositions, negation pitted against affirmation, antithesis pre-loaded. Fuck that.

So – on to women. Women as they were routinely treated in the ancien regime. And into the nineteenth century.

Let’s start with Zola, always the most … registering of nineteenth century novelists. He was attacked for his ‘disgraceful’ representation of the working class in L’assommoir – and in a letter in defense of the novel, he surveys the truth of it, touching lightly on two characters, Bijard and Lalie: “Bijard is only one face of alcohol poisoning. One dies of delirium tremens or one becomes a furious madman like Bijard. Bijard is crazy, the kind that the correctional institutions have to often judge. As for Lalie, she completes Nana. The girls, in the bad worker’s households, either succumb to blows or turn bad.”

Here’s a long quote from the death of Lalie, a little different from a Dicken’s death scene.

“She started at the sound of a heavy step on the stairs. Her father noisily pushed open the door. As usual he had drunk too much, and in his eyes blazed the lurid flames kindled by alcohol.
When he saw Lalie lying down he walked to the corner and took up the long whip, from which he slowly unwound the lash.
“This is a good joke!” he said. “The idea of your daring to go to bed at this hour. Come, up with you!”
He snapped the whip over the bed, and the child murmured softly:
“Do not strike me, Papa. I am sure you will be sorry if you do. Do not strike me!”
“Up with you!” he cried. “Up with you!”
Then she answered faintly:
“I cannot, for I am dying.”
Gervaise had snatched the whip from Bijard, who stood with his under jaw dropped, glaring at his daughter. What could the little fool mean? Whoever heard of a child dying like that when she had not even been sick? Oh, she was lying!
“You will see that I am telling you the truth,” she replied. “I did not tell you as long as I could help it. Be kind to me now, Papa, and say good-by as if you loved me.”
Bijard passed his hand over his eyes. She did look very strangely–her face was that of a grown woman. The presence of death in that cramped room sobered him suddenly. He looked around with the air of a man who had been suddenly awakened from a dream. He saw the two little ones clean and happy and the room neat and orderly.
He fell into a chair.
“Dear little mother!” he murmured. “Dear little mother!”

This was all he said, but it was very sweet to Lalie, who had never been spoiled by overpraise. She comforted him. She told him how grieved she was to go away and leave him before she had entirely brought up her children. He would watch over them, would he not? And in her dying voice she gave him some little details in regard to their clothes. He–the alcohol having regained its power–listened with round eyes of wonder.
After a long silence Lalie spoke again:

“We owe four francs and seven sous to the baker. He must be paid. Madame Goudron has an iron that belongs to us; you must not forget it. This evening I was not able to make the soup, but there are bread and cold potatoes.”

As long as she breathed the poor little mite continued to be the mother of the family. She died because her breast was too small to contain so great a heart, and that he lost this precious treasure was entirely her father’s fault. He, wretched creature, had kicked her mother to death and now, just as surely, murdered his daughter.”

This translation stays demurely away from Zola’s text. If you want to know where Celine got it, read Zola. Her's the argotic French for what Bijard really says:

" Ah ! nom de Dieu, c’est trop fort ! nous allons rire !… Les vaches se mettent à la paille en plein midi, maintenant !… Est-ce que tu te moques des paroissiens, sacrée feignante ?… Allons, houp ! décanillons ! "
Il faisait déjà claquer le fouet au-dessus du lit. Mais l’enfant, suppliante, répétait :
" Non, papa, je t’en prie, ne frappe pas… Je te jure que tu aurais du chagrin… Ne frappe pas.
— Veux-tu sauter, gueula-t-il plus fort, ou je te chatouille les côtes !… Veux-tu sauter, bougre de rosse ! "

Which you have to translate into something a lot more gangsta to get the full poetry of it.

In the English 19th century novel, as is well known, there is a certain gap when it comes to sex. But there is another gap when it comes to wifebeating. Edward Shorter, in Women’s Bodies, his gruesome history of the encounter of women with marriage, hospitals and pregnancy in the 18th and 19th century, devotes a section to the thesis that, in the very recent past, wife beating was universal. He recounts a lot of anecdotes (“Johann Storch of Gotha, investigating the cause of a maternal death in 1724, found that the mother had a broken rib, probably ccaused by a kick from her husband sometime during the pregnancy. (Storch thought that the broken rib had made the placenta grow fast to the womb, thus killing her in childbirth.”) He adduces proverbs, ethnographic studies, doctor reports, and occasionally, but just occasionally, a court document. Eugen Weber, in his book on Fin de Siecle France, writes that there must have been many women such as those in L’assommoir, for whom a pleasant dream was often that of not being beaten.

Weber claims that it was the penetration of bourgeois values that made violence against women in the household more shameful as the 19th century went on. According to this view, both the peasant and working classes lagged behind the ‘civilizing process.’ In the twentieth century, Franz Biberkopf, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, who beats his fiancé to death in a scene that seems to as though it were refracted through one of George Grosz’s more lurid paintings, does go to jail for it: four years. And Biberkopf is haunted by that death. As he says, he never meant to murder Ida. (Ironically, or rather not so ironically, come to think of it, Biberkopf’s great defenders are women – he is a semi pimp, and a certain type of indulgent woman does seem to find him, in Berlin, after he gets out of the Tegel prison).

Here’s Ida’s death – one that strips out even the pathos that Zola left in:

All he had taken in his hand was a small wooden cream whipper, for he was training then and had recently wrenched his hand. And with a twice repeated, terrible lunge he had brought this cream-whipper with its wire spiral, in contact with the diaphragm of Ida, who was the second party to the dialogue. Up to that day Ida’s diaphragm had been entirely intact, but that very small person, who was very nice to look at, was herself no longer quite intact – or rather: the man she was supporting, suspected, not without reason, that she was about to give him his walking papers in favor of a man recently arrived from Breslau. The diaphragm of this dainty little girl, at any rate, was not adapted to contact with cream-whippers. At the first blow she cried ouch and no longer called him ‘you dirty bum’, but ‘oh, man,’ instead. The second encounter with the cream-whipper occurred with Franz holding an upright position after a quarter turn to the right on Ida’s part. Whereupon Ida said nothing at all, but merely opened her mouth, puring her lips curiously, and jerked both arms in the air.

What happened to the woman’s diaphragm a second before, involves the laws of statics, elasticity, shock and reistance. The thing is wholly incomprehensible without a knowledge of those laws. We shall therefore have recourse to the following formulae:”

What follows is a formula for the magnitude of the blow impressed by Franz, f = c lim delta v over delta t = cw.

In other words, Ida’s death is absolutely dehumanized, made into a specimen defined by filling in the variables in a formula.

Two cheers for the bourgeoisie, then. If they raped the servant girls, they rarely kicked their wives to death, at least by 1850. However, it would be unfair not to exhibit another tableau showing a typical response to working class women as agents of violence. Camille Mendés, a sensitive sort, a poet, remained in Paris during the Commune and wrote a book about his experience there, entitled: Les 73 journées de la Commune. I can’t believe the echo of Sade is wholly absent from that book. Anyway, Camille was able to observe that thing which shocked the respectable in the 1870s, the amazons-voyous – amazon hoodlums. Women from the working class armed themselves and fought alongside another communard. Mendés compares them to the famouse tricoteuses – the women who knitted while the guillotines fell. Except these were cantinieres – cafeteria workers. Waitresses, you might say. Never underestimate the waitresses!

‘There was not enough men with holes poked in them by bullets or cut up by the machine gun. A strange enthusiasm took hold of the women in their turn, and thus they fell on the field of battle as well, victims of an execrable heroism. Who were these extraordinary beings, who abandoned the household broom and the working woman’s needle for the cartridge? who abandoned their children to go to be killed by the side of their lovers or husbands? Amazon hoodlums magnificent and abject, they held their own with Penthesilia or Theroigne de Mericourt. One saw them pass, carrying canteens, amongst those going into combat; the men are furious, the women are ferocious, nothing moves them, nothing discourages them. A Neuilly, a food and drink seller, wounded in the head, had her wound bandaged and returned to take up her combat post. Another, of the 61st bataillon, bragged of having killed a score of police and three guardians of the peace. At Chatillon, a woman, remaining with a group of national guardsmen, charged her rifle, fired and recharged without ceasing; she was the last to retreat, turning around at every instant to return fire. The woman who dispensed food in the 68th bataillon fell, killed by a mortar blast which broke her ladle and projected it in pieces into her stomach. … Thus, what is the furor that has carried off these furies? Do they know what they are doing, do they understand why they are dying? Yesterday, in a boutique, rue de Montreuil, a woman enters, rifle on her shoulder, blood on the bayonet – shouldn’t you be home cleaning the faces of your brats? said a peaceful bourgeois. A furious altercation broke out; the virago was so carried away that she leaped on her adversary, bit him violently on the neck, then, falling back a few paces, grasped her rifle and was going to fire when suddenly she grew horribly pale, let fall her arm, and collapsed; she was dead, the anger had caused an aneurism to rupture. Such are, at this hour, the women of the people.”

cioran 2

If you want to write a great literary essay, here’s what you do. You put the point of the thing, the judgment you are making, as high in the essay as possible. Maybe you start out with an anecdote. Maybe you start out with a quote. But the essayist is in the position of the judge, after the jury has read its verdict. He is in the business of sentencing.

It helps, then, if you work on your sentences. Cioran, a Romanian writing in French, did just that. Here’s the second paragraph in his essay on Joseph de Maistre:

“Towards the end of the last century, in the period when the liberal illusion was strongest, one could give oneself the luxury of calling him a prophet of the past, of considering him something like a relic or an aberrant phenomenon. But for us, in an epoch that has been otherwise demystified, we know that he is ours just to the extent that he was a ‘monster’ and that it is precisely by the odious side of his doctrines that he remains alive, that he is of our time. Even if he was, besides, obsolete, he would nonetheless belong to that family of spirits who age in beauty.”

Cioran’s theme is simple, and everything flows from it: the meeting of a time – our time – and the monstrosity of a doctrine. At the same time, that theme opens up a question which is never directly addressed by Cioran, and which betrays a certain contradiction in his theme: for how is it that one time – ‘ours’ – knows the truth about Maistre while it was disguised for another time – that period of the ‘liberal illusion’? Is it merely the course of events – the wars in Europe, the concentration camps? Or is it that Cioran, without being aware of it, owes the idea that we progress closer to the truth over time precisely to that period of ‘liberal illusion’? Surely the illusion wasn’t that Maistre’s ‘monstrous doctrines’ had never been embodied at any time – for if there was one thing the liberal period was sure of, it was the monstrosity of the middle ages, and of the Spanish inquisition, and in general the atrocities wrought under the ancien regime. The illusion was, then, not that atrocities had been wrought, but that the progress of civilization would extinguish the motive and the means for committing them again.

And on this point Cioran knows better. And Maistre, conceptually, also knew better – hence, his status as a prophet. The reason that Cioran’s essay is not a handrubbingly gleeful promotion of Maistre, as Edmund White claimed, nor a straightforward insult to the thought of Maistre, as his scholarly interpreters have claimed, lies in the fact that, however much Cioran wants to bracket a certain period as one of ‘liberal illusion’, he has to admit that, from the start, that his own theory of history has to include some explanation for how such a period was possible. In the essay, this question migrates to a question about Maistre’s interpretation of the eighteenth century, and its relation to the Revolution. As we saw in our previous post, Cioran comes down for a … liberal interpretation of that century. More liberal, perhaps, than a historian of the time would countenance – Maistre, in his Considerations on France, is right to point out the horrible succession of wars across that century, wars that just involved France. God knows there were others. And we also know that thoughout that century there were little famines in Europe that corresponded to the little ice age. Still, Cioran’s essay is not simply about Maistre, but about the lineage of reaction. Having been, himself, a fervid reactionary in the darkest days of the century – the thirties and the forties – having even broadcast in favor of the coup managed by the Iron Guard in 1940 – Cioran’s essay is also a self-examination. The eighteenth century is a proxy for the liberalism – the politics of literature, as Thomas Mann scornfully called it in his reactionary polemic, Reflections of a Non-political man – that defeated the Nazis in WWII, thus putting an end to at least one of the illiberal illusions: that a totalitarian state relying on total mass mobilization was, at the very least, a stronger state than any of its competitors.



(There are several illusions packed into that theme, so popular among the intellectuals of the far right in the thirties. One of the illusions was that the state relied on mass mobilization, when in fact it relied on buffering the population from the sacrifice involved in mass mobilization. The calls for mass sacrifice from fascist leaders, for discipline, for pain and blood, were as phony as the classical facades of their government building. In the end, Germany did as much as it could to give the civilian population, at least up until 1942, the illusion that victory was a cost free process. Hmm, there is something very familiar about this barking rhetoric of sacrifice and this complacent reality of comfort. Where have I seen that before?).

I’ll continue this in a future post.

more pig, anyone?

Everybody knows that the deal is rotten
Old black Joe’s still picking cotton
For your ribbons and bows…
Everybody knows.



I just finished reviewing Robert Kuttner’s new book, The Squandering of America. The book is obviously catnip for a liberal like me, but there was something deep in the book that bothered me. I don’t think I quite expressed that bother in the review. Let’s see if I can spell it out here.

Kuttner’s history is a two panel deal. One panel shows the thirty glorious years from 1945 to about 1975. What do we see? The sun shines on managed capitalism. Union strength rises to almost thirty percent of the work force. Social security is joined by medicare and Medicaid – and even, although this has now been buried, a welfare system for the poor. Public investment is made in building interstates, sending jocks to the moon, combating malaria, and the like. Indirectly, the state takes the risk for an enormous expansion of mortgages, and it loans money to middle class kids so that they can go to college.

Now onto the second panel. In the second panel, we see the thirty dirty years of neo-liberalism. There’s a cloud over the moon, and the wolf howls in the ruins of the middle class subdivision. Union membership falls. Labor’s bargaining power gets weaker and weaker. The one earner household becomes as rare as the Eskimo curlew. Even as the husband and wife both work, their disposable income actually stagnates. The cost of institutional goods – education and health care – soars, and the government massages its statistics about inflation to end run around this fact. A coalition of speculators, big business owners, and the honchos of the political elite agree to essentially de-industrialize the American economy, and this is done by throwing down barriers to free trade – which is an open invitation to American manufacturers to seek out global sites that offer cheaper labor – and by deregulating the financial markets. The benefits of the economy go increasingly to the wealthy, even as productivity goes up.

Now, I do think there is a lot of truth to this two panel picture – I wouldn’t be a liberal if I didn’t! But I wouldn’t be an ex philosophy student if I didn’t notice that juxtaposition is not cause (or perhaps I should say, I’d have to have a lot more faith in Hume than I have). What is missing here is a trend line that found its breaking point in the seventies – I’m talking about you, Mr. Declining-Rate-of-Profit.

Marx would say that the structure of capitalism is such that the Keynesian policy approaches of the thirty glorious years operated like Spanish fly to an old libertine – yes, it helped him get it up at first, but you had to apply more and more of it for less and less result. Less bang for the buck, so to speak. John Kenneth Galbraith, my favorite economist, observed those thirty glorious years from the inside. He contended that American capitalism had entered a mature phase in which the classical model of competition between producers was no longer the major dynamic. In its place, he substituted a model that diversified the levels of competition – long before the Walmart Effect, for instance, Galbraith had traced the A and P effect, that is, the effect on the price system of a entrenched, hegemonic buyer in the marketplace. What Galbraith was saying from the left was actually being put into mathematical lingo by the neo-classical economists from the right – as Mirowski pointed out in Machine Dreams, the shift from the simple, Smithian model of competition to the cyborg model of efficiency was what the fifties were all about.

All of which gets us to the heart of my darkness about Kuttner’s book. The two panel history simply can’t be right. Kuttner’s historical thesis is that the forces of darkness, for some reason, decided in the seventies to counter-attack the forces of light – strong unions, an interventionist state, the structures of managed capitalism – and thus brought about the years of night through sheer politics. But in reality, the economy was in crisis in the seventies. Kuttner would have a better argument if he acknowledged this. He’d have a better argument if he argued that liberalism can’t simply tie itself to GDP growth, because that is going to imperceptibly edge liberalism into a position where policy decisions shift from concern with a just society to policy decisions concerned economic stoking that inevitably promotes more and more unequal outcomes.

Ah, but I am being unclear. It has occurred to me that the solution ‘self-organized’ in the seventies to the stagnation of the American economy was to shift the level of competition to the financial sector. That is, instead of companies competing with each other in an increasingly stagnant marketplace, investors would compete to own those companies. Ownership would be redefined in startling ways, as would the responsibilities of ownership. X company making y and competing with Z would be taken over, stripped of its y making capability, which would be spun off to another company, X1, or it would be merged with Z, or it would be merged with somebody else in a whirl of what you might call epiphenomenal economic activities. And low and behold, new efficiencies would be found – that is, new streams of profit from the ways in which the American firm had been constituted over the decades. A car company, say, would be found to have quietly produced its profit making sector in the loan business – which would then be stripped out, or be used as the investment target for, say, the company’s pension fund, etc., etc. It turned out that firms were, from the financial perspective, rubric cubes.

Now, we all know the down side to this. The upside, however, was that in taking apart and putting together American firms, the investment sector made the U.S. a very attractive spot for foreign investment just as the U.S. lost its hegemony over the global economy. I’m not sure how a liberal economic policy would have accomplished the same result. I am sure that this contributed significantly to the American recovery from the seventies. At the moment, it looks like we have reached the end time for this particular economic regime – a regime that builds in socialism for the rich, as Galbraith once called it. For the more the financial sector was de-regulated, the supposedly ‘smaller’ the government got, the larger became the government’s potential obligations. This is a familiar dilemma – it is the dilemma of third world economies. American exceptionalism is all about the fact that America quietly conformed to a model of state-corporate interaction that resembled, say, Brazil in the sixties. And as the economy became more tiers-mondian, the politics became more coup like.

Which is why the comparison of the American empire to the British empire or the Romans strikes me as so wrong. What America resembles more and more is the Philippines under Marcos. As per my last post, the ethos of looting has spread from the economic models of the late seventies into the very fiber, the blood and ouns, of the sector that has the most control of the American economy – the financial sector. And the government has become an annex to that vast pump and dump shop – hence, the rational irrationality of a stock market that goes wildly up and down on announcements of trivial interest rate action by the Fed. This is the volatility of what is, underneath, an increasingly stagnant market – a market that has reached the logical limit of its possibilities. You can’t slice and dice the pig anymore – even the squeal has been amortized, hedged against, optioned, securitized, pooled and stripped. But there is only so much pig to go around, fellas.

Uncle Sam is always a Pal!

Mickey Rat by Robert Armstrong

Sometimes, LI gets a little down. We think that we have no money for medicine. No money for dentistry. Perhaps not enough money to shelter ourselves, or buy food…
But then we perk up. Because, when the chips are down, the Government is always a pal!

For instance, look at the heartening story of Countrywide Financial Corp., Washington Mutual Inc., Hudson City Bancorp Inc. They was feeling all blue this summer. Sup primes were looking sorta disgusting in the old fridge. Some of the CEOs wanted bigger yachts. And their blood felt tired. Yep, they felt tired all over.

So what did they do? What you or I would do! They went to Uncle Sam. They went to the Federal Home Loan Bank. And they said, Uncle Sam, I’d sure, sure appreciate a loan of $163 billion dollars. Pretty please, with a cherry on top?

Uncle Sam is a jolly old soul, a jolly old soul is he. You know that if you or I went to him and asked for a small loan, say 100 million dollars, he’d look us sternly in the eye and say, son, what fur do you want that kinda carryin’ around money? Before he broke into a big grin and gave it to us – cause Uncle Sam’s an easy touch. So this August and September, he said to them boys at Countrywide Financial Corp., Washington Mutual Inc., Hudson City Bancorp Inc, he says: don’t spend it all in one place boys. And sure enough, he comes up with the dough for em! They was awful appreciative, Countrywide Financial Corp., Washington Mutual Inc., and Hudson City Bancorp Inc was, but you know something sorta sad? They might not be able to pay them there loans back. Seems like with everything happening in the world and poor yippy people seemin’ not to have the money for their new, jump to 20% interest loans (yee haw! those were the funninest loans ever loaned to anybody – we all was crying our eyes out, laughin’ so hard, when we handed them things out) – which you know those poor people is inferior little fuckers – why, looks like good old Uncle Sam might have to eat that loan. But don’t you worry about the upper management at them there loanin’ companies. Why, we got us a new system nowadays in the U.S. – it is called elite impunity. Or, more informal like, Scooter rules! Means that if you are rich – and male and white, remember, these rules apply in all fifty states – why, you got a get out of jail free card! And hell, if you put that money from them their loans in hedge funds, why you can pay less tax than them poor fuckers who don’t deserve the houses they bought anyway!

Is this a great country or what?

So... who's gonna be a bad girl,now?

CIORAN

Because I am researching the pessimists at the moment, I’m reading Joseph de Maistre – which is always a pleasure, even if one can’t believe the transformation going on right before your eyes, as Christianity becomes, in de Maistre’s hands, a kind of Satanism presided over by the God of war. Looking around for secondary literature on de Maistre, I was lucky to find a long essay by Cioran that somebody had, no doubt illegally, put up on the web. Cioran rather beautifully understands the programmatic futility of the reactionary temperament, and I am certainly going to use that essay later. But neither de Maistre nor Cioran’s essay is my focus in this post. Rather, it is the variability of critical judgment.

I wanted to see what the reaction to Cioran’s essay was. The essay was translated by Richard Howard in Anathemas and Admirations, so it is available even to your average mono-lingual American academic. I was surprised that so little was said about it. In Edmund White’s review of Anathemas and Admirations, he devoted some precious newspaper space to the essay:

“The other [essay in the book] is a homage to the 19th-century reactionary political philosopher Joseph de Maistre. With hand-rubbing glee Mr. Cioran chortles and quotes Maistre declaring in an insane period: "In all the universe there can be nothing more peaceful, more circumspect, more humane by nature than the tribunal of the Inquisition." Maistre was sent by the King of Sardinia as his Ambassador to St. Petersburg, and Mr. Cioran identifies with his status as emigre: "A thinker is enriched by all that escapes him, all that is taken from him; if he should happen to lose his country, what a windfall! Thus the exile is a thinker in miniature or a circumstantial visionary."

In his reactionary excessiveness Maistre criticized anything new and praised any authority consecrated by time, which he invariably qualified as "divine." Wryly, Mr. Cioran says in an aside, "Applied to war, the adjective seems, at first glance, unfortunate." With characteristic dryness, Mr. Cioran concludes, "Nothing permits us to regard goodness as the major attribute of the divinity."

I fail to see the handrubbing glee in the essay, which, I think, has a definite center – Cioran, like any good aphorist, has an almost supernatural appreciation for the semantic center of a text – in the paragraph that concludes Cioran’s examination of de Maistre’s most operatic pronouncements about the guilt of the philosophes being at the root of the reign of the guillotine:

“To consider the 18th century as the privileged moment, as the incarnation, even, of evil is to toy with aberrations. In what other epoch were injustices denounced with more rigor? A salutary work, of which the Terror was the negation, and not the crowning moment.”

De Maistre coterie of modern sympathizers recognized, more accurately, the weight of the judgment on de Maistre that Cioran unfolds. Cara Camcastle, for instance, in The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre, writes:

Cioran claimed that Maistre became like his ruthless and extreme enemies the Jacobins; his books are not boring to read because they are penetrated by an invigorating rage. he spirit of the Revolution and the Terror that he relentlessly attacked has penetrated, and been assimilated into, his own thought. THis statement is as constructive as saying that a physician who is caring for the sick during an epidemic should be treated as a persona non grata since he may have become as virulent and dangerout to human beings as the illness he is combating because he has come to understand the illness too well.” (53)

The comparison between Maistre and a physician is, to say the least, strange – if one were to really make that comparison, Maistre is more like a physician who insists on bloodletting as the cure for plague, and denounces science as satanic for saying otherwise. But at least it gives one a sense that there is not a lot of handrubbing glee in Cioran’s essay.

Cioran did not, it seems, hide his fascist past - but he wasn't exactly eager to write about it either. The essay on Maistre, written in 1957, has a certain intimate tone, as though Cioran is talking to himself through Maistre - and that may be due to the fact that Maistre's heady embrace of the worst human institutions might have seemed, to Cioran, to mirror his own madness in the thirties and forties – a political trajectory amply documented by Marta Petreu in a recent book. Carlin Romano wrote a story about this for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“For Petreu, Cioran's life and work look less majestic. To this brilliantly thorough philosophy professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the slippery "fanatic without convictions" (as Cioran later dubbed himself) is the older, probably repentant successor to the messianic firebrand who applied Spengler's philosophy of cultural development to 1930s Romania with unparalleled brutality and fervor.
In November 1933, Cioran won a Humboldt doctoral grant to Berlin, where he quickly became a fan of Hitler. "I am absolutely enthralled by the political order they've set up here," he wrote to his friend Mircea Eliade, the future historian of religion, whose 1930s fascism and anti-Semitism also emerged most prominently after his death. "Some of our friends," Cioran advised pal Petru Comarnescu, "will believe that I've turned Hitlerist out of sheer opportunism. The truth is that I agree with many of the things I've seen here."

Nazism, Cioran wrote, possessed "greatness." Germans had a "need for a Führer," and Hitlerism constituted "a destiny for Germany." Cioran supported a similar dictatorship for his country and believed that "only terror, brutality, and endless anxiety are likely to bring about a change in Romania. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; this is the only way a shallow nation could make a name for itself." "Hitler's merit," insisted the young voice of vitalist barbarism, "consists in depriving his nation of a critical spirit."

That kind of hyperbole marked Cioran's style throughout his career. In The Transfiguration of Romania and his 1930s journalism, it contributed to bombastic bursts of fascism.”

Romano’s idea that the aphorism is equivalent to the hyperbole is common; however, it isn't right. It certainly doen’t apply to Cioran, who is writing in a world in which the camps and more camps were the reality, while the missiles and more missiles were being constructed by the two great powers left. More interesting, however, from the perspective of Cioran’s own fascism, is the way in which his essay on Maistre digs with doglike persistance at the very foundations of the fascist dream. Joseph Frank, reviewing Petreu’s book and another, by Laignel-Lavastine, in the New Republic, concludes his essay with a long passage about Cioran - and I'll conclude this post with a quote from that long passage

The most complicated case of all was Cioran, whose later writings are shot through with passages that may be read as implicit expressions of regret for his earlier convictions, but who never seemed able to repudiate them publicly. He was much more forthright in his correspondence and in private conversation. In a letter to a friend, Cioran declared in 1971 that "when I contemplate certain of my past infatuations, I am brought up short: I don't understand. What madness!" This would certainly seem to indicate their rejection on his part. In conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he said: "What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind."

There can be no question that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous fascism and anti-Semitism tormented the complicated, involuted, self-questioning Cioran, whose thought was always directed toward undermining all of mankind's certainties, including his own. The analysis of the postwar Cioran given here is the most complex and controversial in Laignel-Lavastine's book. He is depicted as both evading any overt responsibility for his past and also, "unlike Eliade," weighed down by feelings "inseparable from a desire for expiation and a sense of diffuse guilt … [an] 'oppressive sensation' with which he admits sometimes awakening in the morning, 'as if I bore the weight of a thousand crimes.'"

As in the case of Eliade, Cioran's past sometimes came back to haunt him. Paul Celan, the great German poet of Romanian origin whose parents died in a Romanian camp and who had himself been deported to a labor camp, was also living in Paris and translated one of Cioran's works, Precis de decomposition (A Short History of Decay), into German in 1953. The two saw each other from time to time, and Cioran came to the poet's aid when Celan was fighting off accusations of plagiarism. Yet when a Romanian critic on his way through Paris laid out the particulars of Cioran's past, Celan refused to have anything more to do with him. Despite this break, Cioran was deeply disturbed when he heard of the poet's suicide. It is suggested that this relationship with a Jewish writer may also have been meant as the same sort of "cover" that Eliade exploited so successfully; but there is nothing to support such a suspicion except that, when Cioran was once asked whether he knew Celine, he mentioned Celan instead. One has the feeling here that, despite her own evident intention to be as fair as possible in stressing Cioran's "ambivalence," Laignel-Lavastine is pushing matters too far.

The same problem arises when she comes to Cioran's attitude toward the Jews. When, for example, a new edition of his most anti-Semitic book, The Transfiguration of Romania, was published in Romania, he insisted that the chapter on the Jews be eliminated, along with a number of remarks about them scattered through the text: "I completely renounce a very large part [of the book] which stems from the prejudices of the past, and I consider as inadmissible certain remarks about the Jews," he wrote to a friend. Nothing could be more explicit. Even more, in one of his later French books he included a section on the Jews called "Un peuple de solitaires" ("A Solitary People") that was hailed as philo-Semitic. But Laignel-Lavastine believes this to be an illusion, because on comparing this text with what Cioran had written years ago, she finds that the image now given of the Jewish people and their history is much the same as that provided earlier--except that what had been evaluated negatively in the past is now given a glowingly positive spin. Moreover, Cioran continually identifies his own situation with that of the Jews, writing that "their drama [that of the Jews] is mine." In 1970 he mused that "I lacked an essential condition fully to realize myself: to be Jewish."

This obsessive self-identification with the Jews is interpreted as "the reversed expression of the same psycho-pathological phenomenon" that had earlier led to Cioran's worst excesses. Perhaps so; but to glorify the Jews instead of vilifying them surely indicates some sort of change. Also, the objection is made that while Cioran often expresses regret about his errors of the past, he never does so except in general terms, without attempting to explain why they are now rejected. For Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran's tantalizingly ambiguous relation to his past is hardly a genuine attempt to come to terms with the practical consequences of the ideas he once espoused and still, on occasion, seemed to toy with in a rhetorically half-amused fashion. She wonders whether, as was the case with Eliade, he was merely "translating into an acceptable language ideological motifs and attitudes [that are] ideologically disqualified in the West." Petreu is much more affirmative on this issue, and cites someone who visited Cioran during his last days, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease: "From his hospital bed, desperately trying to overcome the symptoms of his disease, Cioran stumblingly told his guest: 'I … am not … an … anti- … Semite.'"

Let me add my personal testimony at this point. During my years in Paris I met Cioran and saw him on a number of occasions, and we had a good many conversations (particularly but not exclusively about Russian literature, in which he took a passionate interest). Whatever the twists and turns of his troubled conscience, the brilliantly sardonic, self-mocking, and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive."

Deception is the privileged instrument of the exile – as Humbert Humbert knew. The movement from anti-semitism to philo-semitism is a movement within the pure stupidity of projection, as far as I can tell – philosophical anthropology as the production of coloring books for pissants. But enough Rezeption. I’ll write about the Maistre essay soon.

the ontogenesis of the critic

When LI was a child, we were particularly prone to nightmares.

I developed a remedy for the nightmares that would wake me up in a fright. I would compose a happy ending scenario – often involving shooting a bad guy – with which to go back to sleep. I don’t know how common this is – obviously, if you are small, need sleep, and are at the same time afraid to go to sleep, you need to develop some method to negotiate between those two enormous pulls, panic and metabolism. I am not one of nature’s insomniacs, like Nabokov – before the age of thirty, I don’t recall having much of a problem getting to sleep. Now, of course, I sometimes have whole weeks of insomnia, in which I experience vast patches of shallow or no sleep interspersed by blurry days of a tiredness that haunts me like a guilty conscience until I decide to give into it – at which point it disperses, leaving me wide awake and facing the horror of another night. I know intimately the moment of cock crow, when Hamlet’s father flees back to hell, the garbage truck shakes the dumpsters, and the cars bearing people from various night shifts ease back into the parking lot with an oddly muted sound, as though the cars were on tiptoe. The quickly stifled bits of radio or music that come out of the windows. The sound of the door slamming, and the sound of footsteps.

But outside of the shadow of insomnia, I am still bothered, perhaps more than most people, with nightmares. Last night, for instance, the Nosferatu lookalike who carved up a woman in my dreams and stalked me and a friend (who I didn’t really know – the man in my dream was as familiar as a film star, but I didn’t know his name), had a good time spooking me. Eventually, as the Nosferatu looking man came at me with a gun and had me good and cornered, I woke up. Just enough to know that I had to go back to sleep with another dream plan. In that plan, I jumped Nosferatu from behind, or did something – the events get cloudy here. But I cheated the nightmare’s ending.

I sometimes wonder if this habit betrays the salient characteristics of a born critic. Helpless to direct the narrative in which I am caught, I nevertheless have the power, at a certain point, to get out of it and go back into it – there is a little back door in my dreams. I am not even sure that the ending of the dreams that I contrive are really dreams – they may not have the true sleep seal on them, but exist more in the twilight between waking and sleeping thoughts. But they are often followed by another dream – and sometimes, the next dream is also a nightmare, but of a significantly lesser degree of virulence.

army of vestals - taxonomy 2

I am going to have to deal with Fourier in my happiness project. Fourier, more than any other utopian thinker, dealt seriously with the enlightenment vision of happiness as the key criterion for the political order. Rather than the nebulous pursuit of happiness, Fourier felt that one could build an environment that embodied the particular ruling passions of particular subjects. Building on the base of the three basic passional types (the papillone, - or the going from activity to activity; the cabalist, or the creation of intrigues; and the composite, or the enthusiast) which he felt differentiated people, he imagined a dizzying structure, like Leibniz’s pyramid at the end of the Theodicy – Fourier called it a phalanstery - in which each monad is inhabited by different types whose ruling passions finally find corresponding expression in the best of all possible mini-worlds. The primary types – defined by their ruling passions - multiply in the passional series as they are modified by different attributes at different levels.

Fourier has had an odd afterlife. He was cleaned up and classified by Engels as a romantic socialist. He was the inspiring spirit behind America’s utopian experiments in the 1840s, and favored by Horace Greeley, the same newspaper man who practically founded the Republican Party. He was discovered by Breton as a pre-cursor of the surrealists. And he became one of Roland Barthes great references.

Now, those who study him closely usually have to confront the question as to whether he was, uh, a bit touched in the head. For instance, he seemed to believe that his utopia would stimulate human evolution to the extent that we would, in due time, grow a helpful other hand – a sort of tail, or archibras, as he called it. Also, anticipating the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper by one hundred fifty years, he believed that the oceans might well, in the course of the amelioration of all things, turn into lemonade, and that lions and sharks would give way to anti-lions and anti-sharks, just right for snuggling up to people. Today’s NYT magazine article about bears shows that in this, at least, Fourier is proving correct.

After Fourier died, his followers were divided on what to do with his elaborate sexual doctrines. But these same doctrines became the center of the cult of Fourier after he was rediscovered by the surrealists. And, in truth, they are central to Fourier’s immense plan – for the whole point here is to devise an optimal system of attractions. Thus, for instance, Fourier recognizes that there are two divisions of people who can be classified under the term “Vestality” who are attracted to constancy in the love relationship, and seven divisions of people who are attracted to inconstancy. Fourier imagines a vast industrial army composed of Vestal and Vestale – young men and women – who, when they lose their virginity, are cycled into another group. Fourier constrasts his organized sex acts with the terrible custom of marriage.

For assembling an army, it is enough to publish a table of the quadrilles of virginity that each phalange sends; then those who are declared male and female claimants can not avoid following all the claimants into the army, where they must decide the choice, which is done secretly, without the scandalous publicity that is disseminated among us at marriage ceremonies, where one tells a whole village that, on such and such a day, a libertine, an old rogue, is going to deflower a young innocent. One has to be born in Civilization in order to endure the aspect of those indecent customs that one calls wedding nights… after vile intrigues, after being pimped by the notary and various marriage brokers, one is going to enchain for life two individuals who will perhaps not be able to stand each other at the end of two months.

Compare this to the phalange:

In the combined Order, the celebrations relative to first love will only be given after the union is consummated.

But of course things are never that simple. There are virgin men and virgin women who decide to have sex without announcement – or who become attracted to inconstancy. Of course, there are orders for these people to go into – the Bacchants and the Bacchantes. Who have the function to go out each morning to the pavilion where hundreds of virgins are sleeping and ‘relieve the wounded, that is to say the claimant men and women who find themselves so lead in consequence of secret unions during the night.”

As you can tell just by those two brief quotes, Fourier, among other things, made up his own language to talk about his Fourier world. Actually, to use a word that is now common in the art world, it would be best to talk about Fourier as an ‘outsider’ utopian. His elaborate schemes have some resemblance to Henry Darger’s immense fantasy world, In the Realms of the Unreal, in which the Vivian girls have to go from planet to planet leading the Child Slave rebellion – although of course I don’t mean that Darger was at all influenced by Fourier. Rather, the passion for creating immense, sexually resonant worlds is common to both men.

Fourier is an immense subject. This post is just a brief note to follow up on my response to IT’s criticism of pornographic taxonomy – which is to say the use of Fourier’s taxonomy is to make us doubt the claim to cognitive neutrality, to a sort of asexual position, of those who make the taxonomies that mark up our world, way beyond porn.