on the immortals

When Eric Auerbach enquires about the notion of “figure” and its broader use in rhetoric and literature, he begins by going back to Varro and the adaptation of Hellenic thinking by Roman writers in the 1^st century B.C. When I begin thinking about the notion of “mortal” and its use as a category term to denote human beings, I begin by going back to “Bewitched” and the cartoons featuring “Thor”, which I saw as a boy in (it seems to me, now) the living room in the house we lived in on Nielson Court in Clarkston, Georgia. I long for Auerbach’s scholarly depth, but depth must bow to the multitudinous experience that feeds it. Plankton, after all, sustains the whale.

It does seem to me, looking back, that the use of “mortal” for human being was a fact I accepted without thinking about it too much. It seemed that certain creatures – superheros, witches – would think that humans are mortals. But it didn’t seem to me that this meant humans were limited by death. Death, in those pj-ed, tv watching days, was not very clear to me. Certain people died. My mom’s father, for instance, died. But I had a foggy view of my grandfather, who I saw only when we went down to visit D.C., and in my mind, he shared more characteristics with the non-mortals than with the mortals – he seemed remote, powerful, a little scary at the dinner table.

Now I look back and wonder why the category of “mortal” crops up so naturally in American popular entertainment. “Mortal” has, in these shows, a sneer attached to it. Mortals are inferior to --- well, the other side is rarely called “immortal”. According to the Iliad, ““the breed of immortal gods and of men who walk the ground is in no way alike.” Classical scholars distinguish between deathless, athanatoi, and immortal, ambrotoi – the latter, according to Manu Leumann’s Homerische Wőrter (quoted in Seth Bernardete’s The Argument of Action), is related to the pair of words brotos, “gore”, and brotos, mortal. “The gods are called deathless (athanatoi) because they are bloodless (anaimones), for to be bloodless (ambrotoi) is to be immortal (ambrotoi).” Ambrosia is the English orphan born of these deep and forgotten currents. However, in the cartoon world there is a continuing fidelity to the tie between blood and mortality. We bleed, and thus we die. Whereas only ichor, a mysterious thing, flows in the arteries of the gods.

Of course, tv paganism is an odd thing, bursting out of the supposedly Puritan U.S. culture. TV paganism –and its Hollywood and comic book cohorts – does not come out of the addled brains of those who have been reading too much Pindar. So the problem of this cultural pattern, one that is entangled with literacy, is deeper than the toss off word, ‘influence” -  which also holds an effluent inside it – can explain.

If we can drain the blood from a chicken or a goat, we can drain it from a human being – such a thought surely crosses the mind of any pastoral people. Andrian Mihai, in an interesting article in Numen, crosses the notion of mortality and bloodlessness with the co-equal primitives of air and fire. Mihai quotes extensively from funeral monuments, plays and poems to show that the gulf between the immortals and the mortals is not the great abyss between the bloody and the bloodless. According to Mihai: “Etymologically, the root of aither is aithō, ‘to burn, blaze,’ suggesting the sense of ‘pure or clear air.’ It is not only a region of the skies that surrounds the world — the highest and the purest part of the atmosphere (as it was for the natural philosophers up to the nineteenth century), but it is also a certain condition of the sky, its brightness and translucence (Kahn 1994:145). Thus, aither is to be distinguished from aer, the misty or vaporous air, the lower part of the air extending from Earth and up to and including the clouds (Hesiod, Theogony 125).”

Here’s the thing: TV, following radio, is “on the air”. This phrase seems to accompany the earliest broadcasts, and has engrained itself into our imagery of audio/video technology. Nihai claims that the mortals imprison the radiance of the sky within the blood and flesh body. A familiar image. That the aether escapes, at death, is also a familiar image. Air wants to be free. And similarly, to be on the air speaks to another dreamlike escape. The immortals are naturally attracted to the ‘airwaves’.

Thus, a blind shoot of this old fourfold thematic, air/water/fire/earth, finds its way into our TV addled childhoods.

Montaigne and the witches

The witches

“Firstly, private error makes public error, which in turn, makes private error.” –On the lame, Montaigne

In the English speaking world, the credit for the idea that the witches persecuted in the witch hunts of Europe were actually members of an underground pagan cult, trapped like a bubble inside Christendom, goes to Margaret Murray, writing in 1921. But the idea was actually articulated long before Murray in 1862, in Jules Michelet’s book, The Witch. Michelet, familiar with the philologists, used the comparativist method that became a craze for desk bound anthropologists in Murray’s time, like J.G. Frazer. It did not escape Michelet that the ‘odious’ custom of brothers sleeping with their sisters in Basque country, an accusation relayed by Pierre de Lancre, the head of the witchhunting commission in Labourd (Southwest France)  in 1609, reproduces a custom of the mages of Persia.

De Lancre is a mysterious character, a footnote in not only the histories of witchcraft in Europe, but in Montaigne studies. He owes that latter to the fact that he married Jeanne, Montaigne’s great niece, in 1588. In the former, he has figured as a miserable inquisitor, responsible for the death of thousands – Rudolph Reuss’s evaluation in the 19^th century – to a faulty old gull, responsible for most probably a couple of executions, and certainly for the flight of two priests and a number of Basque common folk from the Lebourd territory – a twentieth century view. Reuss, who probably read about Lancre in Michelet, took Lancre’s estimate that there were as many as thirty thousand worshippers of Satan in Labourd at face value. Michelet took many other of Lancre’s comments, in his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, at face value as well. This may be because Lancre’s dark reading of the willingness of the women of Labourd to consort with the devil (including much detail about the size of the devil’s penis and his preference for fucking pretty women from the front and ugly women from behind, which Lancre presents – from the testimony of one of his 17 year old prisoners – as self-evident) was read in an inverted way by Michelet, who saw this as an obscure revolt against the bleak hegemony of the church and king.

Jan Machielson, in a fascinating essay entitled Thinking with Montaigne, contemplates Montaigne’s odd relation with two of the doctrinaire demonologists – Lancre and Lancre’s source for certain of his theological claims about the heresy of not believing in witches, Martin Delrio. Delrio was a Spanish Jesuit who, as Machielson points out, was not involved in using the persecution of witches as a cover for the persecution of skepticism, an idea that has persisted from the Enlightenment down to Richard Popkin. Rather, Delrio shows himself skeptical of one of Montaigne’s great reasons for adopting a skeptical attitude to the testimony of witches: the power of the imagination. In addition, Lancre’s writings are evidently, stylistically, influenced by Montaigne. In fact, Lancre honors Montaigne whenever he mentions him. Lancre was a lawyer from Bordeaux, where Montaigne was mayor, and he has an evident respect for him deriving perhaps from the lawyer’s humanism of those circles.

However, it is interesting that Montaigne’s great theme of inconstancy – his idea that, as he says over and over again, the I is the great natural monster, an ever changing Proteus at grips with an ever changing ocean of objects  – becomes, in Lancre’s hands, the reason that the Basques are so attracted to Satan. Instead of rooting themselves to the fields, the Basques in this region, which includes Bayonne, are great sailors and whalehunters. Lancre suspects that the sea, with its bottomlessness and storms, makes these people rootless. Not only that, but the men tend to leave the women alone for long periods of time. Hence, the devil comes in.

Montaigne, in the essay that is most concerned with witchcraft, On the Lame, presents a very interesting critique of the idea that to know is to know the cause of a fact. For Montaigne, this gets ahead of what one wants to know first: is there a fact? Montaigne is wary of the instinct for marvels. The marvel weaves around itself a story about its cause, and that story is then woven around in turn by a larger story, and so on. But what do we know about causes?

This is why Montaigne interrupts his meditations to continually tell the reader about himself. For his telling is telling from a cause, the self. And as the telling is broken, changeable, sometimes implausible, and full of holes – so our sense of causes in the world should be precarious and uncertain. At the same time, Montaigne does have an account of the spread of error, which we have quoted at the beginning of this post. This is one that, twisted in another direction,  has informed Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of the history of witches: that the narratives can be recoded by the inquisitors, played back to the population they are hunting through, and come gradually to be accepted by that portion of the population that is in continuity with the beliefs and practices the inquisitors have hunted. The benandanti first make sense of themselves as being on God’s side, and then, after the inquisitors insist for decades that they are on the devil’s side, they slowly change their mind: but they don’t change being benandanti. This, in fact, seems to be the story in Mexico, as well, with the way the Nahua magicians saw themselves during the 16^th century.  

For Clint

“The world is turning into vinegar.”

Thus spoke the gentleman who bought our desk, yesterday, when he came to pick it up. He was explaining that he and his wife, for “ideological” reasons, now attempt to get all their things second hand. “Things are in the saddle and they ride mankind,” Emerson said. This man’s opinion was that things were now riding all too roughly, and crushing not only mankind but the whole world, the lock stock and barrel of atmosphere, continents and ocean. This is a sentiment I’ve heard a lot of in Paris, lately.

I thought of this guy when I read the portrait of Justin Bieber’s manager, “Scooter,” in the New Yorker this morning [Note: Technically, this way of changing a top is known in rhetoric as the “spitball transition”, and it is illegal in league play. But it is good enough for Limited Inc!]. I learned a lot of things about Justin Bieber in the profile. I learned, for instance, that he was discovered by Scooter on Youtube. This warmed my heart with the infinite flame of love. I still like the Soviet avant-g. idea of the 20s that, as the tools of art are given to the people, the line separating the aesthetic domain from everyday life will be liquidated. Now, the problem turned out that you can’t wish away the sphere of circulation. You still can’t, but, in the classic manner of building the socialist future in the ruins of the capitalist present, Youtube is bringing the tools of circulation nearer the masses. Justin Bieber,  meet Dziga Vertov.

But back to the world turning to vinegar. There is a passage in the profile where Scooter displays his vehicles. Natch. Here’s the passage:

“Braun recently bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. It is a large, modern bachelor pad with double-height ceilings and a wall of windows overlooking the city. To get to the front door, you walk on slate stepping stones through a koi pond. In the foyer are shelves displaying meaningful tokens: a signed copy of the basketball coach John Wooden’s “Pyramid to Success”; a sketch of Braun’s sports car, a hundred-thousand-dollar electric vehicle called the Fisker Karma (“I got one for me and one for Justin,” he said. “It makes you help the environment, but you also don’t have to feel like a pussy”); a poster commemorating Bieber’s performance at the White House, signed by President Obama.”

I spied with my little eye a connection between Scooter Braun and our customer, yesterday: the DIY politics. We live in an era where, in France, the EU, China, the U.S., politics is no longer the art of the possible, but the stylization of the impotent. Government is doing shit, all over the world. As in no other period, we have the tools to Technicolor dream the disasters we are approaching. But it is as if we are in a magnetic sleep. Mock democracy, which is in the stage when the oligarchs pilfer as much as they can, is the new form of democracy. You can demonstrate against it. You can twitter against it. You can make fun of it from the sidelines. It doesn’t matter. Parties exist, now, so that party elites can massage messages, on the one hand, to get an American idolish favorable handcount, and, on the other hand, to amass enough favors for the plutocrats to open the doors for themselves and their families and friends.

Thus, the reaction among the masses of letting a thousand flowers bloom – from buying hundred thousand dollar electric vehicles to writing devastating, Zizek laced critiques of the latest HBO craze. As the world turns to vinegar, there is a mass sentiment that somebody needs to turn around the machine. Or even turn off the machine. But “somebody” is nobody.

Which brings me (spitball two!) to Clint Eastwood (to whom I have three magic words: Krapps Last Tape! Rarely have I ever seen a role and an actor come together with the inevitability of,  well, the historical necessity of overthrowing capitalism. Performance of a lifetime, I’m telling you!)  I watched the Jon Stewart show about the Republican convention, and thought Stewart made a very astute analysis of invisible Obama. But when I went and watched the speech, I noticed that the Comedy Show elided one key moment. It was the moment in which Eastwood said that there are twenty three million unemployed people in the U.S., and he found this disgusting.

I thought that was a beautiful moment; but it was clearly a DIY political moment. The GOP has no intention of finding any way, whatsoever, to hire those twenty three million unemployed people. And Obama’s administration has spent four years stoically never, ever speaking about them. Of course, in 2009, they could have all, every jack, been hired by the government. That would have cost a trillion dollars. But the Obama administration had another New Deal program in place, lending 16 trillion dollars at ultra low rates to Wall Street. That program worked. I’m pleased to say that the 1 percent, who suffered a major  asset hit, started to recover by 2011 and are now on track to continue engrossing more income as a percentage of the national income than they have since 1928. As for their incalculable wealth, well, did I mention the New Yorker profile with the guy buying 2 100,000 dollar electric cars?

Well, Clint was, as anybody could see, mostly off his rocker. And still, that it is only a man off his rocker who dares mention the number of unemployed people in the country shows how we have swallowed the premise of mock democracy hook, line and sinker.

“Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . . for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely--(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again)--great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality--(Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again)--unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire--(Krapp curses loader, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again)--my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.”   

montaigne: sketch and the portrait 2

VII. Montaigne

What was Montaigne’s point in writing his Essais? Although the essays include history, philosophical meditations, literary criticism and something like reportage, Montaigne disclaims any ambition to be a historian, philosopher or poet. He recurs, again and again, to the notion of the self-portrait. Like the painters whose works he saw in Paris when he traveled there, he would paint himself. But he did not take this to mean that he would write his autobiography. Rather, most often, he talks about following his “fantasies”. This movement is in correspondence with a larger theme: that life is continually in motion. This motion is in everything – and Montaigne often seems to want to find stylistic equivalents for it, shocks for his audience. Thus, along with the dignified image of a man painting his own portrait, Montaigne would also describe his work in much lower terms. This is what he writes at the beginning of “On Vanity”: 

“I cannot compose the register of my life by my actions, for fortune has put them too low. I compose it then of my fantasies. It is thus I have seen a gentleman who could only communicate his life by the operations of his stomach: You see him show in his home an order of basins, produced over seven or eight days: this was his study, his discourse. To him, any other kind of talk stank. Here, to put it a bit more civilly, are the excrements of an old spirit: now hard, now soft, and always undigested.”

This passage creates a difference, a moment in reading in which the reader is torn away from the intimacy of his act. A note in the Pleiade edition attributes the anecdote about the gentleman who displays his feces for his guests to a classical source. But the final comparison of the essays to an old man’s scat is Montaigne’s own. The high/low register, here, is, as it were, unfettered from its usual structuring difference: high and low interpenetrate one another, and the hierarchy in which the high has dominion is pronounced, metaphorically, by a shit. This delight in perspectival paradoxes, in making ambiguous the register of the discourse, is  not a unique stylistic discovery of Montaigne’s. The Baroque poets and Protestant ministers are already finding a rhetorical energy in the shocks of mortality, juxtapositions that are meant to induce a religious vertigo – a strong sense of the present as owed entirely to death, against an eternity that is ruled by a deity whose thoughts are entirely unknown. These shocks are all the more charged in that they could be turned to deliver blows  to hierarchy’s projection in the social – to republican, or at least frondeur uses.

It is not to this use of opposites, though, that I want to point us. It is, rather, to something else, something having to do with Montaigne’s intention to write within a rejection of genre,  even at the risk of presenting us with old man’s scat. Eric Auerbach pinpoints something important about the method of Montaigne’s Essays that relates to Montaigne’s sense of the perpetual flux of things:

“Every kind of specialization falsifies the moral picture; it presents us in but one of

our roles; it consciously leaves in darkness broad reaches of our lives and destinies. From a book on Greek grammar or international law the author's personal existence cannot be known, or at best only in those rare cases where his temperament is so strong and idiosyncratic that it breaks through in any manifestation of his life. Montaigne's social and economic circumstances made it easy for him to develop

and preserve his whole self. His needs were met halfway by his period, which had not yet fully developed for the upper classes of society the duty, the technique, and the ethos of specialized work, but on the contrary, under the influence of the oligarchic civilization of antiquity, strove for the most general and most human culture of the individual. Not one of his known contemporaries advanced in this direction so far as he did. Compared with him they are all specialists: theologians, philologists, philosophers, statesmen, physicians, poets, artists; they all present themselves to the world par quelque marque particuliere et estrangiere. Montaigne too, under the pressure of circumstances, was at times lawyer, soldier, politician; he was the mayor of Bordeaux for several years. But he did not give himself over to such activities; he

merely lent himself for a time and subject to recall, and he promised those who laid tasks upon him de resprendre en main, non pas au poulmon et au foye ( 3, 10, p. 438).”

Auerbach’s term, specialization, refers to a broader sweep of divisions of activity than employment. The sociologist Abram de Swan has written about the professionalization and proto-professionalization that affects “experts” and “lay people” as follows:  

The internal process of professionalization creates external effects among ever-widening circles of laymen, who adopt the basic stances and fundamental concepts of the profession as a means of orientation in everyday life: it is a process of proto-professionalizaiton, in which laymen learn to recognize some events as “a case for the lawyer’, others as a ‘suitable case for treatment”, and so on. 

Auerbach attributes a part of Montaigne systematic, though non-systematized distaste for the professional orientation towards life, whether we represent the professional as a poet or an academic, to the fact that this attitude was such that he could afford it -  he was, as he points out often, the heir of his father, a man who was good with “affairs”. Affairs is the word Montaigne uses to describe the household as an economic unit. He is not himself interested in expanding his economic reach, at least in his own account. That lack of desire to have more is etched deeply into the Essais, and is thematically germane to Montaigne’s contempt for ‘specialization’. Montaigne knew that his nobility was recent, and that his family history was populated with money-makers.  On his mother’s side, his ancestors were, in all probability, Spanish Jews, who originally specialized in the old clothes trade and branched out to other goods once they moved to France. Pierre D’Eyquem, his father, was a noble – he is so denominated in his marriage contract – because his grandfather, Ramon, had purchased the Chateau of Montaigne, which conferred a title of minor nobility. Before that purchase, the Eyquem family had been known primarily for merchandizing wine and dried fish.

So there is a sense in which Montaigne’s debt to his father could only be paid by managing affairs himself. That debt is unpaid. And the activity that would go to make up that debt is even viewed with scorn. This is a ‘fold’ not only in the text of the Essais, but in Montaigne’s own life. Walter Benjamin once wrote that the true dynamic in history is not a matter of cause, but a matter of “debt” – Schuld – meaning, as well, guilt. The past is always a guilty past, a past we owe a debt to. Montaigne’s liberation – what his fantasies have done for him – is to gradually transform his perception of the debt he owes his father into a perception of the debt he owes himself – the debt he owes through the fact that he exists and experiences. This, too, is the result, the physical result, of his parent’s action. It is in the face of these twin debts that Montaigne forms his attitude towards the professional orientation and its social coordinates – broadly, custom, which he saw as logically hostile to the broadness of life. Montaigne often comments that his Essays are attempts to paint himself, to think of himself, to find out what he is; the antithesis of this project is the professionalization of experience. One of the stylistic and thematic peculiarities of the essays is how often Montaigne seems to go out of his way to contradict one assertion with another, one citation with another, one anecdote with another. Montaigne employs the same mode of shock to his own ‘specialty’ – that is, the writing of the essays. The metaphor of painting oneself has an acceptable correlate among the arts – but the metaphor of excrements is a way of making the sense that we touch the author when we touch the book turn into something taboo.

role model liberalism and soap opera

As everyone knows, the best Danish tv program ever was Kingdom (Riget), the Lars van Trier weirdness. And in fact I’d go so far as to say that no other program featuring autistic, dwarfish dishwashers as a Greek chorus to the main events was as good as Lars van Trier’s version of an autistic, dwarfish pair of dishwashers acting as a Greek chorus to the main events in the show. My favorite character in Riget is, of course, the evil Swedish doctor, who comes to the Danish hospital trailing rumors of malpractice in his native Sweden. The show made his denunciations of Denmark a regular feature: as I recall, many episodes ended with him standing on the hospital roof, looking towards Sweden, and showering curses – like a Swedish Mephistopheles – down upon the incorrigibly backwards Danes. “Here is Denmark, excreted from limestone. There is Sweden, chiselled from granite. Danish scum!”  Here’s the Youtube link thatlines up all the curses.

However, Kingdom was a one shot deal. Lately, A. and I have been watching Borgen, another Danish tv series. This one is about a female prime minister – you can see it on Linktv, complete with English subtitles. It is an interesting study in Role Model Liberalism. The prime minister is elected as a moderate – which, in tv land (and in the media) – is the G spot of politics. The idea actually goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric –we take social temperaments or positions, we label them as extremes as one type or another, and we then have a mathematical grasp of them, so that we can find the middle. A young man is impetuous, an old man is scared of any change, and a middle aged man is sometimes impetuous, and sometimes scared of change – or prudent. This sociology of types has long been obsolete, but in the media world, it is applied religiously to politics: if the left wants x and the right wants z, why, y must be just what the world is waiting for! This method makes no sense, since it neither diagnoses the political problem nor the solution.  However, it has tremendous fans in the media, in which the people who are ‘opinionmakers’ or tv series directors are paid enormously and want to keep their class positions, but at the same time have identified themselves as representatives of a long tradition of progress. It is the same impulse that keeps geriatric rock n roll bands singing tunes full of old adolescent sneering. 

The show I boggled at was one involving a crisis –the show is set up around the old crisis/solution format – that occurs when the Prime Minister  daringly introduces a law that would force corporations to institute parity between men and women (50-50) on their corporate boards. This is introduced with the implication that here we have the latest in ultra-feminism. That the measure would simply affect say one hundred wealthy women in Denmark is never, quite, brought to the fore. The reason is that this is the feminism of role models, and obviously the writers and producers think that the triumph for some corporate dog is a triumph that can be shared by all women. Just as women could once look at movie stars  and dream a little dream, now they can look at the rich and sassy bread of  corporate heads and feel liberated deep inside.

Role model liberalism used to be called tokenism and other dirty names, in the radical sixties,  but it has gradually crept into the very texture and weave of the contemporary liberal or progressive ethos, and not only in America. Of course, the crisis in the show was averted when finally, the prime minister and the CEO of Denmark’s biggest corporation face off and she gets him to yield – cause he’s a very human curmudgeonly CEO. Of course – no caricatures of Mr. Moneybags in the era of  Role model liberalism!

Luckily, the show realizes that role model liberalism is incorrigibly dull –thus, the real juice   in it all tends to the standard soap opera themes that are our real role models for getting into and out of trouble in the prison  of ordinary life : will the p.m.’s husband adjust to her new fame? Will the spokesman have an affair with the Labour Minister? Role model  liberalism dissolves, at the crucial points, into the older appetites. I like the older appetites a great deal, but I feel like raining curses on Denmark whenever the moderate political solution raises its ugly head in the program.  

character: between representation and cause

Character, unlike the soul, or the person, or the self, has never settled its ontological accounts, so that it can be said to exist in the “world” or in the “representation of the world”.

Seventeenth century character books were written in the shadow of the ut pictura poesis – which gains its legitimacy not just in the tradition of the humors, but in the tradition of the portrait. Plutarch, at the beginning of his life of Alexander, makes the association between the picture and the character explicit:

“For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.  Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.” [B. Perrin, translation]

The association of the character with the sketch, the picture and the mask pulls the concept into the domain of representation, and it is here that “Alexander” can become a character in an anecdote or a life. The association of character with expression, with what is under the surface, with virtue and vice, pulls it into the domain of the self, the person, the soul – and, most importantly, of cause. It is here that character can impose itself in history, for it is not simply the character Alexander, but the character of Alexander, that is exposed in his Life. In the first association of character we can see the roots of the notion of alienation – an imprisonment in obsessions, routines, repetitions, humors. Self-representation, then, does have a causal status in as much as it causes  others to act in a certain way to the imprisoned character, and the prison grows more impenetrable as the character precedes to write itself into this script. In the second, character is something outside of the prison, something recognizing, something that stands, emblematically, before the good and the bad, the act and the habit. In its second guise, character can be ‘acted upon’, trained. Character, here, is linked to education – in the humanist tradition, in a text like Montaigne’s The ‘institution’ [education] of children’, character is the central object of all teaching.

It is the conceptual fate of character that it should have these two analytically distinct poles, and that historically, as they coalesce in the semantic space of “character”, they bleed into one another.

The way character has come to straddle these realms of being makes it hard to imagine (for an "us", a Westerner, a paleface, a member in good standing of the artificial paradise) a culture with a semantic table of fundamental elements that wouldn’t have a word for, or a notion of, character.

Conceptual history, armed

In his Begriffsgeschichte – The history of concepts – Reinhardt Koselleck pays homage to a predecessor in the field of understanding intellectual history emically: Richard Koebner. The homage is also a parable. Koebner began, in the twenties, by looking at the medieval period in Köln, writing a book entitled 'Anfängen des Gemeinwesens der Stadt Köln”. In the book, Koebner examined what 12 century burgers of Cologne could have meant when they used such terms as “urbs” or “civitas”. But, as Koselleck points out, Koebner didn’t think as much about what a 1920s German might mean by “Gemeinwesens” – community. “In retrospect, today’s reader might of course stumble over the fact that Koebner used as his highest thematic concept for the republican conception of the city, “Volksgemeinschaft” (community of the people), not really a concept derived from the sources, but a modern concept of the 19^th and 20^th century that he projected onto the high middle ages. He was thinking primarily on the legal factor that a republican city state would allot equal rights to citizens. We may be certain that Koebner, twelve years later, as he was forced to emigrate to Palestine, would no longer have used the concept of ‘Volksgemeinschaft”. For it was just this concept that, extended under evidently racist criteria, served as the battle cry to exclude Jews from the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’. If yu like, Koebner was one of the early victims of this semantic displacement, that allowed and evoked the death of hundreds of thousands of German citizens and millions of innocent people. Koebner must have remarked upon this as he emigrated from Breslau to Jerusalem in 1934.” [58]

Koebner, then, is a case not only of a historian who honed the methods of the history of concepts, but was also a victim of a ‘displacement’ of concepts – of meaning. Intellectual history may seem to have no claws, but – Koselleck is saying – this is a delusion. There are no tamed beasts in history.

editing the last post: sketch and portrait

The standard reference in twentieth century writing on characters in literature is E.M. Forster’s division of characters into round and flat ones, elaborated in Aspects of the Novel (1927) with the same exemplary application of Cambridge method as that by which Ansell, in The Longest Journey, proves that there is a cow in the room. That is, distinctions are made, flare up in a burst of illumination, hold for an instant, are manipulated, and then retreat back to the dark. In the case of character, however, Forster is speaking in character as a novelist, and he wants to approach character as a technician: the point is that character enters narrative as a devise to be manipulated, worked on a grand scale and on a  miniature one, and is ultimately  in the hands of the reader, which is where the fun of the novel is. Readers, then, as well as novelists need a lesson in character, and this requires a lesson in distinguishing degrees, or types, of character.  Forster relates his flat characters explicitly related to the comedy of ‘humor’ in the 17^th century, and he writes that they are “sometimes called types, sometimes called caricatures” – the calling here being done by the critics.  Round characters, on the other hand, have complexities that lie “under the surface”. Forster’s roundness is actually three dimensionality, and round characters have perspectival depth.
The distinction between flat and round is very much a pictorial reference, made explicit in the idea of “caricature”. In fact, in the early modern re-appearance of character, the Theophrastian ‘character’ and the Aristotelian “ethos”, which come down in two different lineages, could be and were figured under the metaphor of the sketch and the portrait. Both have different values. Both thematized character in different ways.
…
In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire speaks of a certain kind of croquis, or drawing, in which everything depends on the “velocity of the execution.” This velocity is not only the difference between the sketch and the finished painting – it is, transposed to the tradition we are looking at, the difference between character and ethos. The character writings, inhabiting the routines of the humors, the temperaments, up through Le Bruyare, were wedded to speed. Baudelaire, in fact, compares the painter of modern life – Guys – to La Bruyere at one point, for the combination of elements in his talent that are usually distributed among characters with different life-styles the amateur of life, the lover of forms, of sensation, of the crowd, who nevertheless possesses the art of being serious.
Baudelaire’s insight, on the threshold of modernity, can be taken backwards into the conjunctions between character and ethos that feature in the different types of literature of the early modern period in France – the play, the letter, the history, the story, the essay.

The sketch and the portrait: 1

The standard reference in twentieth century writing on characters in literature is E.M. Forster’s division of characters into round and flat ones, elaborated Cambridgianly in Aspects of the Novel (1927) – that is, the distinction is made, held to the light, manipulated, and shown to be grossly workable and perhaps of some interest to the novelist, but – in terms of where the fun in literature is, the emotional affect of the narrative, the affair that one has with the text – not very useful. Forster’s flat characters are explicitly related to the character of ‘humor’ in the 17^th century, and are “sometimes called types, sometimes called caricatures”. Round characters, on the other hand, have complexities that lie under the surface. Forster’s roundness is actually three dimensionality. The figures have perspectival depth.

The distinction between flat and round connects to a vocabulary that connects character to the sketch or the portrait, thereby, I think, negotiating the difference between the two thematics of character that were re-discovered in the 16^th and 17^th century: the Theophrastian character, and the Aristotelian ethos.

Jean Lecointe has examined the transmission of the rhetoric of ‘the person’ that takes up this second source of the early modern notion of  ethos. Aristotle introduces ethos in his Rhetoric as one of the three sources of legal argument, where character lends plausibility to the argument either that a person did something or didn’t do it, or did it excusably. Plausibility is a very important realm of social reasoning in Aristotle  - the plausible makes logic socially respectable, in as much as what is plausible is what is believed by credible, or respectable, persons. Probability, a mathematical concept, bows here to a pseudo-mathematical concept, the majority, meaning the majority of people – or rather, people who ‘count’. As Lecointre points out, ethos, which was taken up and expanded in the Roman tradition of  rhetoric, largely disappears from the rhetorical tradition in the Middle Ages in Europe, in favor of a Christian typology and an ideology of imitatio. It reappears in the rhetorical tradition with the Renaissance turn to Cicero,  especially On Invention, and the diffusion and translation of Plutarch’s Moralia and Lives.

It was at this point in the intellectual history of character that the organizing pictorial metaphoric makes its appearance. The two aspects of character divided between the sketch, or character, and the painting, or portrait.

children's games and perspectivism

The last day Tom and Kiyo were here, I asked their four year old son, Takeo, what his favorite things in Paris were. The boat? [the Bateau-bus which goes from Hotel de Ville to the Trocadero]. The Eiffel tower? Take bit into his ham, admired the way he had made it look like a fish, and said, one was the boat, two was the Eiffel tower, and three was the playground. And thus Take miniaturized into mere dust the Notre Dame, the noble façade of the Louvre, the Trocadero and all the tourist must-sees in comparison with a quarter acre of sand and rubber with climbing equipment in the small park at the end of Rue des Archives.  Some find the ultimate statement of perspectivism in Jenseits von Gut und Boese – but these simply haven’t had a discussion about the state of the world with a four year old.

There is no better exercise in perspectivism than watching kids play on the playground. We had let Take loose there, and at first he had clung to a small exercise bar that was around his height. Around him swirled mothers and kids, mostly speaking French, and over on the bench his dad and his friend, Roger, were making encouraging noises (which sometimes even penetrated the filter that nature erects in the brain of the child to keep it from being cretinized by adults too early), and Take was sizing up the place. A playground is an experiment in perspectives. There are the sizes of the kids and the sizes of the equipment; there are degrees of difficulty and fun; there are the adults, the sprinkling of kids that are just too old to be there, and then the enormously different tribes, the one and a halfs, the three year olds, the six year olds, etc. It is one of those rare human moments in which the verbal and the tool do not dominate. The play is directly connected with perception (the metaphoric base of perspective). Huizinga’s much disputed distinction between the ludic (play) and games has its best evidence here. Back in the fifties,  one of my favorite anthropological  couples, Peter and Iona Opie, parked themselves in playgrounds in Liss, Hampshire, England and just recorded the games, rhymes and interactions. Jonathan Cott did a wonderful profile of them for the New Yorker back in 1983. I’ll quote Iona:

“Adults sometimes ask us why my husband and I use the word “people’ in our book in children’s games – as in, “you need six people to play a game.’ But that’s what they themselves say. We’d never like at all to make fun of children, because this isn’t what we’d want to have done to us. So if a child makes a mistakein saying a world we would never print it that way. But if it’s his ordinary way of talking, that’s fair enough, that’s the right way of saying things.”

The book is “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren”, and it is a great guide to such things as Wall Street and Intellectual property. The Opies have recorded numerous game crazes, where one game will take over a  playground – and then it will be suddenly dropped, with the muffled thump of a Facebook stock being offloaded by a punter. And they record verses that have been around for centuries being claimed by children who have altered a word, or even think they made it up.

Repost, edited: Marx and the devil

Marx and the devil

“He’d sell his soul for gold, and he’d be right, for he’d be exchanging dung for gold”

– Mirabeau on Tallyrand.

The great myth under which modernization understood itself in Germany was an old chapbook tale about an obscure professor selling his soul to the devil – an old story indeed. The professor, Faust, was taken up by Goethe and placed at the center of a poem which touched the thoughts of every German intellectual in the 19th century, including, certainly including, Karl Marx.

The devil intrudes fairly often in the narrative of capitalism – as it is woven on the heights, in the heads of the economists, and as it is unraveled at the depths, among ordinary people. Marx was, among other things, a great tracker of Mephistopheles. More than any other thinker of the nineteenth century, he sensed the shape of the web that was being blindly woven by the colonial offices, the businessmen, the political economist, and the rentier, and he saw what they couldn’t see, the pattern of Nemesis that was impressed upon the weave. But this was not a vision that appalled him – on the contrary, when in the utopian mood, he saw in this work the product of the discovery that there was no human limit to the use of the earth. When in the utopian mood … and against this, with the eye that Shestov claims is given by the angel of death, who has a thousand eyes, to those they come for whose time, it turns out, has not arrived – he writes of the dissolution of the human limit as a system of “universal prostitution”. It is the third eye that leaps out of the intricate jumprope rhymes of the dialectic and looks about in this world and sees the ruins and the small pleasures, the pleasure in smallness, which is what is being taken away forever.

Yet seeing this loss for what it is, Marx still connects resentment over it, mourning, – the mood in which the great reactionary theme of irrevocability is couched – with a romantic point of view that he feels is discredited and unreal from the outset. It is a point of view that depends critically upon the bourgeois point of view to which it forms an antithesis. It is the attitude of a parasitic existence in that it denounces those conditions that it inevitably, practically exploits. The romantic point of view would unwind history, undiscover the new world, and return to the giants – “the single individual [who] seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself.” The characteristic of that erection of independent social powers and relations is found precisely in money. The romantic point of view longs for another kind of independent power, the power of the gods, the power that antedates the discovery that there is no human limit and emerges as a protest against the world in which man is made a “universal” in relation to the great world universal-maker: money.

One should ask, however, whether Marx is right to connect this romantic viewpoint exclusively with a dissident faction of the bourgeoisie. In actuality, many of the romantic themes transform popular, grass roots themes and conceptual schemas – touch, as it were, on superstition, that loose system of beliefs which it was the point of the enlightenment program to overcome. In fact, as a sort of check on the emergence of attitudes that come with the advent of universal history, we have interesting anthropological data which is uncontaminated by readings of Ruskin or Tocqueville. In a famous paper, The Genesis of Capitalism amongst the South American Peasantry: the Devil’s Labor and the Baptism of Money, Michael Taussig wrote this about a population he did field work among:

In the southern extremities of the Cauca Valley, Colombia, it is commonly thought that male plantation workers can increase their output, and hence their wage, through entering into a secret contract with the devil. However, the local peasants, no matter how needy they may be, never make such a contract when working their own plots or those of their peasant neighbors for wages, It is also thought that by illicitly baptizing money instead of a child in the Catholic church, that money can become interest bearing capital, while the child will be deprived of its rightful chance of entering heaven.” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1977))

Taussig explored popular sense-making of the effect of the implantation of the regime of capitalism – a good developmental project – on a primitive peasant culture. He found that the introduction of a fully monetized exchange value economy in the rural community in Colombia that he chose to study in the 1960s was interpreted by the myth of selling a soul to the devil. Mephisto shows his horns again. But why this convergence of sense-making narratives?

Taussig suggests that we can use Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism to explain how, spontaneously, a “primitive Marxism” springs up among the people. One wonders, however, if the direction of the interpretation can be reversed as well. Could we explain Marx from the direction of the people of the Cauca Valley? Could it be that Marx’s method reflects, unconsciously, the observation of the work of the diabolic in the capitalist system? Can we read backwards – the witch’s direction – here?

First, this is what Taussig writes:

“Rather than dismissing these responses as "traditional" or irrational, the approach adopted in this essay is that it would seem to be more true to the facts as well as more enlightening to consider these reactions as outcomes of a clash between a use value orientation and an exchange value orientation, thus viewing them as the beginning of a potential critique of capitalism. They provide us with insights into the irrational basis of our own economy and stereotype of homo oeconomicus, and can be usefully considered as illustrative of a form of "primitive Marxism."

Which raises the question: How is contracting with the devil derived from understanding a change in economic regimes from a “use value orientation”?

But to continue with Taussig:


“

This "primitive Marxism" was undoubtedly inherent in the outlook of the European proletariat in the early stages of the birth of the capitalist system, but has since been largely superseded by a new world view which regards the wage contract system, market pricing, and the institutionalization of profit and greed as natural and ethically com- mendable.1 In the light of this historical amnesia, which afflicts all social classes in a developed market economy, it is all the more important to dwell on the critique offered us by those neophytic proletarians in the Third World today, who are just entering the capitalist system with their goods and labor and who often appear to regard that system as anything but natural and good.2 In the Cauca Valley the sense given to the devil and his role in contracting wage labor is like the definition of the early Christian fathers as "he who resists the cosmic process," which in this context comes close to the idea of forcing things in the interest of private gain without regard to what are seen as their intrinsic principles (cf. Needham: 69-71).”

The “forcing” is an imposition from the outside. And it is pre-figured in another pre-capitalist economic form - the notion of sacred predation, the notion that the powerful have a divine sanction to take more than their share. This  sanction does not make them non-predatory, but instead institutionalizes their predatory status. In the chain of being, the creator God is also the taker God. The fall of this old ethos is recorded throughout the eighteenth century, masked to an extent in the rise of happiness as the social justification of the power structure. Taussig is talking about a culture moment that occurs, theoretically, as a result of the dissolution of sacred predation in the emergence of a new economic system, a new totality of social forces. But it doesn’t simply emerge – it is ‘felt’ as being imposed by something outside the social whole. Its exteriority joins it, archetypally, to images which exist (as portents?) in the old system. This is a thread expertly danced by Deleuze and Guattari in The Anti-Oedipus. .

But to return to Taussig, it is not the simple form of the contract with the devil that fascinates me as much as the “money as double” form – a story that has striking resemblances with Marx’s treatment of money in the Grundrisse, and with Balzac’s story, the Peau de Chagrin.

According to the belief in el bautizo del billete (baptism of the bill), the Godparent-to-be conceals a peso note in his or her hand during the baptism of the child by the Catholic priest. The peso bill is thus believed to receive baptism instead of the child. When such a baptized bill enters into general monetary circulation it is believed that it will continually return to its owner with interest, enriching the owner and impoverishing the other parties to the deals transacted by the owner of the bill. The owner is now the Godparent of the peso bill. The child remains unbaptized, a cause of great concern since the child's soul is denied supernatural legitimacy and has no chance of escaping from Limbo or Purgatory, depending on when it dies. This practice is heavily penalized by the Church. The baptized bill receives the name-the "Christian name" as we say in English-that the baptismal ritual was meant to bestow on the child and is now referred to by that name. It is then set to work as follows. The Godparent pays the bill over as part of a routine monetary transaction, as when one pays for goods in a store. The Godparent mutters the following type of refrain:
Jose
Are you going or are you staying?
Are you going or are you staying?
Are you going or are you staying?”

I am tempted to make some interlinear collage between this and Marx’s brilliant demonstration of the doubling to which social labor, embodied in the commodity that is raptured by money, which also embodies a social, exterior force, is subject. But let’s not muddy the track. Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care:

The bill, referred to by its name, is asked three times whether it is going to return to its Godparent or not. If everything works as it should, then it will soon return to its Godparent, bringing a large amount of money with it. This transfer is accomplished invisibly. A black middle-class family owned a corner store in the village. Halfway through the morning, when the wife was alone, she went out the back and then quickly returned because she thought she heard a noise in the till. Opening it she found all the cash gone. She then remembered that one of the customers had behaved peculiarly earlier that morning, and realized that someone had passed her a baptized bill. As soon as her back was turned, this bill had made off with all the money in the cash register. In a busy supermarket in the large city nearby, a shop detective was startled to hear a woman standing near a cash register chanting under her breath: "Guillermo! iTe vas o te quedas? ,Te vas o te quedas? ,Te vas o te quedas?" He promptly concluded that she had passed a baptized bill and was waiting for it to return to her with the contents of the register, and he immediately arrested her. She was taken away and nobody knows what happened thereafter. One of the few successful black store owners in the village was saved from a great loss only by a most unusual coincidence. Serving in his shop he was startled to hear a strange noise in his cash register. Peering in he saw two bills fighting with each other for possession of the contents, and he realized that two customers, each with their own baptized bills, must have just paid them over and were awaiting their return. This strange coincidence allowed him to prevent the spiriting away of his cash.”

…

Wendelin: “The devil is not the worst by far, I can deal better with him than with many people. He honors the elderly, his grandmother stands high in his regard, and that is a fine character trait. When he shakes hands he means it, one can see that he has had much to do with knights; he fills his end of the contract much more promptly than many an earthly dirty dealer. Of course, afterwards, on the delivery date, then he comes on the very minute. On the stroke of twelve, he grabs his soul and goes, with beautiful regularity, with it back to to his house in hell. He’s really a proper businessman, he is.”
Pfrim: I am too old, a satanic pact wouldn’t do me any good now, but when I was as young as you – my soul, I didn’t know what to do with my soul. -Nestroy, Hollenangst

–

“Just as exchange value, in the form of money, takes its place as the general commodity alongside all particular commodities, so does exchange value as money therefore at the same time take its place as a particular commodity (since it has a particular existence) alongside all other commodities. An incongruency arises not only because money, which exists only in exchange, confronts the particular exchangeability of commodities as their general exchangeability, and directly extinguishes it, while, nevertheless, the two are supposed to be always convertible into one another; but also because money comes into contradiction with itself and with its characteristic by virtue of being itself a particular commodity (even if only a symbol) and of being subject, therefore, to particular conditions of exchange in its exchange with other commodities, conditions which contradict its general unconditional exchangeability.”

What Marx means here by a general commodity is one so purified of its mortal nature, as a use value, that it has been entirely transfigured into a pure commodity, unsoiled by human hands. Particular commodities, on the other hand, like Goethe, have two souls within their breasts – longing to be exchange value, and ending up as use value. In fact, in their end is their justification, at least in one of the social spheres that, altogether, constitute the total society. Yet it turns out that the use value of exchange value embodied in money is involved in a self-referential bind – it can’t quite dematerialize itself. Like the money in Taussig’s story, quarreling in the cash register, money is always in the process of shedding its nature, which is to be an intensional object – dependent for its meaning and existence on a social attitude – and presenting itself as something independent and even autonomous. There have been many dreamers of a utopia of money, in which something would simply be recognized by all as a measure of value outside of all social relations – although, alas, this impossible object would have to fall into the world again if it is actually to be exchanged – that is, if it is actually to be of use. The flies in the spider web dream of the superfly that would deliver them. It is part of the fallen nature of money that, strive as we will to find that unit outside of the social that will operate immaculately inside the social, it always reflects the particular conditions of exchange.

“But on one side, exchange value naturally remains at the same time an inherent quality of commodities while it simultaneously exists outside them; on the other side, when money no longer exists as a property of commodities, as a common element within them, but as an individual entity apart from them, then money itself becomes a particular commodity alongside the other commodities. (Determinable by demand and supply; splits into different kinds of money, etc.)”

When Marx talks like this, of “sides”, what is he saying? Where do these sides exist? This question isn’t impertinent – that is, it isn’t as though the sides are ‘metaphors’ for a logic of, say, the spirit. Later on, Marx will make a note that he has to express these things less “idealistically”. But we can see that these sides are not arising in the kaleidoscopic turns of the Absolute spirit. They are happening in the here and now. They have an actual social existence – that is, the sides are performed. In a sense, this is what is happening in Taussig’s story of baptized money. But it is also what is happening when money exists as, so to speak, an infinitely deferred referent. The wealthy or enterprises concerned with wealth have, so to speak, assets in money, but the real existence of that money is another matter entirely.

The culture of happiness, that is, the culture in which the ideal is given as either the individual pursuit of happiness or the collective’s pursuit of happiness, presupposes a certain interchangeability of happiness, a certain harmony that would make all happinesses consistent one with the other. At the same time, the real conditions for growth – the overcoming of the human limit upon which the pursuit of happiness is premised – is dependent on a system in which the opposition of happinesses are understood as the drivers of growth. This is a “contradiction” in the Marxian sense – not of logic, but of elements within a total system.

“The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic) relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided dependence of the producers on one another. Each individual’s production is dependent on the production of all others; and the transformation of his product into the necessaries of his own life is [similarly] dependent on the consumption of all others. Prices are old; exchange also; but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develop fully, and continue to develop ever more completely, in bourgeois society, the society of free competition. What Adam Smith, in the true eighteenth-century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period preceding history, is rather a product of history.”

The all-sided dependence of the producers – in this way, the people come into history. In this way, the caterpillars begin to develop wings. In this way, universal history is born. This is one of the contradictions that gets in the throat both of capitalism and Marxism. There is, on the one hand, an all-sided dependence that breaks man out from the condition of idiocy, of private servitude and local superstition, in which he had been bound. But how does this happen? It happens through the division of labor, and the de-personalizing of the routine of labor. Just as with the peasants of the Cauca valley, the dominance of exchange value over all other market systems – of which we now have an extensive anthropology, thanks to Polanyi – produces not the all sided perfect man,  but a multi-tasking wage laborer – besieged, as it were, on all sides. Where you gonna run to where you gonna go? Well the rock won’t hide you, and the rivers are bleeding. And after the revolution, what is to become of your all sidedness?

“Just as the division of labour creates agglomeration, combination, cooperation, the antithesis of private interests, class interests, competition, concentration of capital, monopoly, stock companies – so many antithetical forms of the unity which itself brings the antithesis to the fore – so does private exchange create world trade, private independence creates complete dependence on the so-called world market, and the fragmented acts of exchange create a banking and credit system whose books, at least keep a record of the balance between debit and credit in private exchange. Although the private interests within each nation divide it into as many nations as it has ‘full-grown individuals,’ and although the interests of exporters and of importers are antithetical here, etc, etc., national trade does obtain the semblance of existence in the form of the rate of exchange. Nobody will take this as a ground for believing that a reform of the money market can abolish the foundations of internal or external private trade. But within bourgeois society, the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it. (A mass of antithetical forms of the social unity, whose antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand, if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.)”

The New York Times "our"

Perhaps nothing is as alarming to the average person as those moments when the elite tries to get cozy. It is rather like a boa constrictor asking you for the next dance. Politicians do it by using the word “folks” – an affectation shared by George Bush and Barak Obama. Mitt Romney does it by confiding that after the torture-death of his dog Seamus, he and his family (cue Romney-laugh) have had “many” dogs.

But the one that sets me back the most is the NYT “our”.

The NYT reporters, secretaries, and crewe doubtless bring home enough bacon to chase the middle class dream in the NY/NJ area. But these are not the people who make with the “our” – that is the specialty of the columnists. And one thing that is guaranteed about the columnists: they swim among their own kind, the upper class in America. Although sometimes they go out among the unwashed, they prefer them to be exotic - in India, or Angola - and they are definitely not spending the night in some crummy hotel in Wheeling West Virginia to ask the yokels for their take  on things. You can be confident that they have great teeth, excellent vacations, and do not have to worry about whether they can take the kids to Disneyland this year. Unless they truly fuck up their investments, they are cruising high, high above the 99 percent.

But such being the blindness of tribal human nature, they do not look out at the world and see themselves as a small minority, among a vast majority of the endebted and laborious. Rather, they look out at the world and see their kind – the “our”, their America – and the other kind, which generally consists of dronebait Middle Easterners and, on the high end, wonderful French restaurants.

There is a great example of the ferocious, upper class “our” in the NYT today in the Well section. The column is entitled: "How spoiled are our children”. It is by Perri Klaas, M.D. And if ever an “our: reeked of the gated community, it is this “our”. It is an “our” where the question of the summer is whether “we” are spoiling our kids. That "we" never even tickles the lifestyles of the two worker family circa-ing around 50 thou a year. Are you kidding me? Do those people exist?

Perri Klaas, according to her biography, should be aware that there is an “our” out there that is a whole other  “them”. She “received her A.B. from Harvard in 1979, her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1986, completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Boston, in 1989, her fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital in 1992, and practiced pediatrics at an urban health care clinic in Boston for 12 years.” Through the scrim of these names, one detects some honorable, seventies-ish ambition to bring medical care to the people. But like much seventies-ish liberalism, the years and the economic opportunity that have flowed over it seem to have converged at some liveable midpoint where the people are, well, other people whose kids are going to Harvard.

The content, such as it is, to the answer, how spoiled are our children, comes here in the mid grafs:

“The official pediatric line — I said some version of this to that mother last week — is that you can’t spoil babies by taking good care of them. But even that doesn’t turn out to be simple.
“It’s important to be there and to be responsive and responsible, but it also doesn’t mean that you have to be totally at the whim of the baby,” said Dr. Pamela High, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University and medical director of the Fussy Baby Clinic at the Brown Center for the Study of Children. “You’re teaching them patterns and routine and regularity.”
Parents can meet a baby’s needs while still allowing her a chance to learn to settle down and sleep without being held. In a randomized study on babies with colic that was published this year by Dr. High’s group, when parents got help with issues of feeding, sleep, routine and their own mental health, those colicky babies cried less and slept more.
As children get older, setting limits and establishing family routines and expectations gets more complicated. But it’s still a question of balancing immediate gratification and larger life lessons.”

Ah, that balance! I’m sure “we” are very grateful for the advice, as our heads submerge once more into the general shitstorm spewed out by the Great Recession. In order to provide some larger life lessons, perhaps one should balance our fear of spoiling our children with 'their' fear of establishing the family routine of desperately seeking employment. 

Here’s a story, for instance, about interrupted family routines from Philadelphia:
“Effective August 15, 75 state employees will be out of a job at the Philadelphia Unemployment Compensation Service Center. The employees were notified of the layoffs on Monday afternoon in a twist of irony. A team of experts were sent to help those notified of the layoffs learn how to apply for unemployment benefits. The twist of irony is that all of those in the room who were notified already know how to file for unemployment. The people being laid off were responsible for answering phone calls and processing claims.”

The Pennsylvania government, one should remember, is conducting a GOP war against it largest city, and has been for some time.Later in the story we find that the Center is shutting down because the recession is practically over:

“There are nine unemployment compensation service centers operated by the state and the one in Philadelphia is the only one that is scheduled to close. There was an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent in Philadelphia for the month of May. This number is compared to the 7.4 percent rate for the state and the 8.2 percent rate for the country. The unemployment rate for the city was at 10.8 percent in May of 2011.”

The NYT “we”, fortunately, is not being fired.  Klaas’s column is very sweetly qualitative – she could, of course, while talking about buying children “stuff”, have referred her readers to the Department of Agriculture’s calculator for the cost of raising children, which is here: http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/calculatorintro.htm.  According to Daily Finance, using the calculator one finds that a “Midwestern family with an annual household income in the $57,400 to $99,390 range, and a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, will spend $578,050 on both by the time the first one is college-age.” Meanwhile, in an effort to unspoil such obviously entitled people, the bipartisan consensus is that we have to cut their ‘entitlements’, and continue to operate with the proud off-shoring, free trade policies that have so amply benefited 'them', or at least the people in the hedge funds who short their companies, to make this a world class nation. 

Our parents and our children will all benefit, they with the work discipline they so obviously need, we with our concern about whether the Whole Foods beef is really all that grass fed. Distressingly, they, the people outside of the gated community, will no doubt respond with their usual slackness, buying their children bunches of screens while the parents work at their tedious little jobs and munch down a sickening number of French fries. Or as a paragon of “our,”  the Nicole Kidman character in To Die For, expresses it so well:

“Who are they?               

A bunch of   17 year-old losers

who grew up in trailers...   whose parents sit around drinking

and screwing their cousins. I'm a professional person,

for Christ's sake.”

I could almost make an “our” haiku out of that snippet of dialogue.

character sketch

John Earle’s Microcosmographia, published in 1628, is one of the English character books. It delineates characters – in the footsteps of Theophrastus, whose Characters was recovered and translated into Latin by Casaubon in the 1590s, and thus spread to England, where - in a highly theatrical culture -  character books became fashionable. These books all had the same format, in which, under some title, a character was “sketched” out. The drawing reference, with its implication of a quick impression, a first draft of a picture - imposed itself universally. The sketch and the portrait, the impression of the face and body, as though for a mask, kept a sort of secret faith with the etymological roots of “character”, with all that meant in terms of a metaphoric of stamps, of reliefs, of coins, etc.

What strikes me is that the notion of character – the type - is still, in a sense, larger and more diffuse than the samples of it – the tokens. That character is, literally, a type, a letter, is a batted about trope in a culture where the pun still had a quasi-argumentive force. But what exactly a character is, what its social extension would be, is, as Earle’s book shows, a matter that is literary, psychological, sociological, or situational, without there being any set method to distinguish one from the other. Earle’s characters include: a child;  a young man;  an old college butler; an attorney; and a handsome hostess. Overbury’s include a “pirate,”  a ‘fayr and happy milke-mayd”, and ‘a drunken Dutch-man resident in England”.

The type seems to float above  these tokens, as though its scope, where its wit would strike, was not defined. 

What holds them together is not their social role as much as their pictorial or theatrical one. In the preface to the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton speaks of his book “intruding” on the theater of the world – which image is crucial to envisioning a world populated by characters.

In the translation of “character” in texts from other cultures, one sees the same call upon theater or pictoriality. For instance, the Chinese word, xinxin, is often translated as character, but it is also translated as heart or heart mind. For instance, in Ji Yun’s 1723 essay, “Actor and Character”, he quotes an actor who specialized in female roles explaining how the role must be played from the heart:   “When I imperonate a female on the stage, I not only try to look like a female in my physical appearance; I also try to feel like a female in the depth of my heart. It’s the tender emotions togetherwith the sweet and delicate demeanor of a female that enthralls the audience. If I keep my male feelings, even just a trace, it will betray my true self…” (2002, 89) Imitation is not contingent to character, here: it is rather the method by which one grasps character’s essence.

Ji Yun is closer to the ‘inner character” that was associated with character in the 19^th century than were the 16^th century character writers in England. These, in turn, are closer to these  passages in the the Natya Shastra, the classic Sanskrit text on theater in 200 A.D: Here we read:

 “characters are of three types: superior, middling and inferior.” Although this hierarchy is generally true, mixed types are also possible: “Maid servants and the liker are characters of a mixed nature. A hermaphrodite is also a mixed character, but of an inferior kind. O the best of Brahmins, the Skaara, and the Vita and others [like them] in a drama are also known as characters of mixed nature.”

There are four kinds of heros: “the self-controlled and vehement (dhiroddhata), the self controlled and light hearted (dhiralalita), the self-controlled and exalted (dhirodatta) and the self-controlled and calm (dhiraprasanta)

Gods are self controlled and vehement, kings are self-controlled and light-hearted, ministers are self-controlled and exalted, and Brahmins and merchants are self-controlled and calm Heroes.”

The world here is not, unlike the Elizabethan and Jacobin worlds, theatricalized, but rather the cosmological order of society is pressed against the theatrical.  The result – the theater of character – instills a duality into the social persona between appearance and reality. The possibility that all men could be players is founded on the possibility that all men can play other ‘characters” than themselves. The difference between appearance and reality is social and practical before it is theoretical or aethetic. It is hedged in by beliefs about the humors, the passions, and the soul in the European societies of the once upon a time, the early modern, but it is felt to exist, a crack, a stage direction, underneath the surface of things.   

Self and character

While doing her fieldwork among the Makassar, a people living on the peninsula of  Sulawesi, Indonesia who are ‘renowned” for their seafaring and fishing skill, Birgit Roettger-Roessler noticed that her informants were uneasy when asked to tell about themselves, and when they did, they told her narratively thin stories about what they did – not why they did it, or what they felt. On the other hand, she found that the Makassar enjoyed gossiping about each other. Roettger-Roessler was disappointed by this state of affairs at first, as the standard notion in the eighties, when she did her fieldwork, was that first person accounts were  more reliable –more authentic. Gossip, however, is, she presumes, the stock that fills up many an ethnographer’s notebook.

However, as she reflected on this curious situation, she noticed that other anthropologists also reported that first-person autobiographical accounts were difficult to get from informants all over the South Pacific, and in Africa. And she concludes, as other anthropologists were also concluding at the time, that there is something very “Western” about first person life stories. This is a large  conclusion pinned to a small reference: St. Augustine’s Confessions. This reference is, I think, itself very Western – the idea that a book has an impact over a thousand and a half years, changing the narrative taboos of ordinary people all over Europe and beyond, rests on a very vague kind of intellectual history.

However, Roettger-Roessler’s work with the Makassar eventually forced her to consider the notes she was putting in her fieldwork journal, where it turned out that there were plenty of life-histories at second hand. The Makassar gossiped. They also would tell about themselves in certain triangulated situations – in ordinary conversation, for instance.

All of these fragments are gathered together under the form of theses about person and self, which define the cosmology eighties anthropologists were interested in. It is interesting that character no longer carries any conceptual weight in this discourse, even though, as late as the nineteen fifties, anthropologists were willing to speak of ethnic ‘characters’, or individual characters within a group. And yet it doesn’t seem that what is being narrated in gossip and rumor, or told in pieces in conversation, among the Makassar is an account of the person or self. Rather, what seems to apply are the traits that character coordinates. Joseph Ewen, an Israeli literary scholar, has proposed that character is a matter of three axes: complexity (of traits), development (action of some kind) and penetration into the interior life (words involving cognitive and affective states). These axes are of use in narration. Outside of narration, they are senseless.

Is there character, then, outside of the text?

From theophrastus to william burroughs: the proto-history of the routine

James Diggle, in his edition of Theophrastus’s Characters, claims that the work should be translated as something like Behavioral Types or Distinctive Marks of Character. The metaphor, still working on a flat surface, was a drawing, or the portrait. But the drawing was of a general type – generated from out of Aristotle’s typology of vices, as well as the vices of other moralists of antiquity. It was the character-defining vice that concerned Theophrastus, who took the medical view of them as aberrations from the soul’s true state of health. A German classicist in the nineteenth century defined Theophrastus’s notion of character as “the sum of individual symptoms of an ethical concept.” [Immisch, 1898] This strikes the right note – one notices that the characters –the toady, the chatterbox, the oligarchic man, etc. are not characters in stories so much as they are lists of characteristics, one following the other, with the same kind of identifying zest that is put into enumerating the colors and songs of birds in a birdbook. The birds are lifted out of the forest and individuated, just as the characters are taken out of the city and individuated.

The social space in which this kind of individuation happens is comedy. Theophrastus, it is said, “would use all kinds of movements and gestures” in his lectures. “Once, when he was imitating a gourmet, he stuck his tongue out and licked his lips.” The modern American gets this, for we have seen it thousands of times on television, and we have done the same thing at parties and seen people who are good at doing this kind of thing. It is called a “routine”.

Where did routine come from? It is a burlesque/vaudeville word. The OED’s first citation for it as a stage term is from 1926, but that seems pretty late. Searching around in Google Books, I came upon Brett Page’s 1915 Writing for Vaudeville. Page footnotes the term routine, as though his readers may not have heard of it:

Routine – the entire monologue; but more often used to suggest its arrangement and construction. A monologue with its gags and points arranged in a certain order is one routine; a different routine is used when the gags or points are arranged in a different order. Thus routine means arrangement. The word is also used to describe the arrangement of other stage offerings – for instance, a dance: the same steps arranged in a different order make a new “dance routine”.

Page’s suggestion for writing the gags is uncannily like the compositional method in Theophrastus’s Characters – which has long puzzled scholars, who are not sure what the book was composed for.

“Have as many cards or slips of paper as you have points or gags. Write only one point or gag on one card or slip of paper. On the first card write “Introduction,” and always keep that card first in your hand. Then take up a card and read the point or gag on it as following the introduction, the second car as the second point or gag, and so on until you have arranged your monologue in an effective routine.”

“Then try another arrangement…”

The routine is the tentative narrative of the list – it emerges from the list, viewed as a form of compulsion. William Burroughs called the episodes in his novel Naked Lunch “routines,” for the book moves more around gags than around characters in the novelistic sense – and so joins up with the Theophrastian character, which was originally a gag, an ethical symptom.