techniques of the body: a kiss is not just a kiss

 In Marcel Mauss’s Techniques of the Body, he begins his discourse with a few references and a few anecdotes. This is one of the anecdotes:

 

"A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris ; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema.”

 

We are familiar with the idea that tv and movie violence provokes violence in the general mob. The more subtle notion that many of our basic traits have been folded, spindled and mutilated by various dream factories – this is something more, a surplus.

 

INn Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, Daniel Harris made the surprising argument – or rather, exhibited the  surprising implication – that the Production Code, the Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded a device that pornographers now generally use, and that also may have moved from the reel to the real.

 

“During the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors' mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels, raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws, full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the winds, abandoned her shallow pretense of enraged resistance, and succumbed wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. And then, after the ten fleeting seconds allotted by the Legion of Decency had passed, the inopportune entrance of another character often sent them dashing to opposite corners of the room where, their clothing rumpled, their hair a mess, their faces infused with fear and suspicion, they fiddled with tchotchkes on the mantel or stared pensively at spots in the carpet, retreating into the solipsistic isolation of their guilty consciences. The stiff choreography of this asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by indiscreet maids.”

 

I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” But there is something to Harris’s vision in the kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband, which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit longings indeed.

 

Even if I don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration of a kiss.

“Hollywood kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretense of solitude, of barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of penetration alone.”

 

Ah, the cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Plus, of course, for pornographers, too, the ravishing kiss was more of an interfering preface than a moment of… ravishment.  Bataille’s insight, which was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the perversions it spends its times blotting out.

 

Disappointingly, after this promising start, Harris anchors his insight in a realistic ideology that has no historical basis whatsoever:

 

“The exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking, morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional representations are drifting further apart.” In fact, of course, this account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated animal – with their “daily experiences” is entirely bogus. It was the aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties – that encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused of being childish and non-productive, with being, basically, wankers. Curling up with the book and curling within the womb – same story. The confessional is a really a bow to the puritanical edict that art must teach us something, that dedication to the aesthetic in itself was frivolous, not to say vicious.  Nor is the dip into daily experience something that was encouraged by realism in the classical sense, which was, contra Harris, a matter of showing that daily experiences are always drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand. Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for existence – accumulation.

 

That ideology blights Harris’s essay, but I like to think about the way the cut and edit of the kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema accidentally gave birth to the loops of porno films, which, although seemingly all about unending coupling are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss.  Once one begins mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance, Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on.

 

How this influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question that, unfortunately, Mauss did not answer. I think though that kissing was definitely impacted by the movies. In spite of the code, it was part of the general enlightenment brought to the population, in which the lineaments of gratified desire are the endpoint of the revolution.

 

Which, given these years of gloomier endpoints, is an endpoint I’m positive about.

death of a political animal

 

… il avait tué la marionette. – Paul Valery

So often in the past twenty years – the bla bla era – I imagine myself, a political animal, in the figure of a fly dying at the base of a window. The fly keeps bumping against that congealed air that 350 million years of evolution had never warned him against. The fly’s experience of the world, which is, as is well known, a place divided into 360 spaces, each space radiating a certain glow, and the edge of each space grading into the edge of the next space save when the edges parted to make a passage just exactly equal in width to the width of a fly’s body, seems, for magical reasons, no longer to work. In addition, something seems to be happening in the back behind the eyes, the load, as the fly would name it, that it always carries about and that sometimes gets sexually excited. Something seems to be squeezing the load. Normally, a pressure like this would prompt the fly to escape, but lately the 360 spaces seem to be liquefying to such a degree that they no longer scatter to the fly’s wingbeats. This is not good news. And, as the fly falls over, there flashes through its mind, absurdly, the first line of an old joke: “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

I am not dying of pesticide intoxication, exactly, but of that subset called “news intoxication”. And as the dying fly figured out, there’s no Cold Turkey option.  

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

 

Léotard “qui tenait le spectateur

sous l’empire d’un Plaisir

indefinissible »

 

did not die on the flying trapeze

in some circus tragedy.

He died of smallpox

 

after inventing a new thrill altogether

at the same time Baudelaire changed the weather

of the modern.

 

Baudelaire doesn’t mention him at all

-          while his “memoirs”, an illiterate scrawl

bring out a snide remark from the Goncourts.

 

“… la hardiesse des sauts périlleux

L’imprévu des case-cou”

-an alexandrine arrested in mid-motion

 

a caesura crossed, from one bar to the other.

His suit, which showed the effortless bother

of the muscular ripple of his too mortal flesh

 

was named for him. In the brief spasm

of his flip and grab, orgasm

washed across the faces of the gaslit crowd.

 

Did Emma B. in outtake carry home some sense

of the sex in this suspense

a syncopation lost?

Baudelaire

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

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

- La Vie doloureuse de Baudelaire, by Francois Porche

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

2.

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Treadmill of Production

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

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

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

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

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

1999).”

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

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

Schnaiberg writes:

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

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

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

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes

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

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

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

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

Bla Bla Bla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different kinds of crazy: the centrist version of history

 

The center-liberal view of resistance to vaccines in the pandemic has rested on what it thinks is a rational view of history: the government is basically looking out for the people and rarely ever lies or misleads in its larger policies. I found a perfect expression of this in, where else, the NYT, in the “ethicist” column. In that column, some clueless type asks a question and the ethicist answers it. The question this time is one of inheritance – which perks up the ears of the country club set that runs the nyt – with the questioner thinking of disinheriting his daughters who have become rightwing anti-vaxxers. In response, the ethicist fabulates a response beginning like this:

“Back in the late 1960s, when the “generation gap” gained currency, many families were divided over political questions, involving the Vietnam War, women’s rights, racial justice. Facts were relevant to these disputes, but at the heart of the matter were moral questions — e.g., When is a war just? Should social roles be assigned to people on the basis of sex?”

This is as fictious a view of the 1960s as anything woven out of thin air by the maddest Trumpite. By “elevating” the notion of “moral questions” over the “relevance” of fact questions, we just wipe away a whole dirty record of lies that actually happened in the sixties, lies told by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, lies that led to what, at that point in time, was known as the “credibility gap” – a gingerly country club name for lying, which is the shall not be named of the U.S. establishment press – beginning with the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, including the secret war in Laos and in Cambodia, fed by multitudinous lies about the conduct and prospects of the war that were standard issue of what reporters then called the “five o’clock follies”, and of course ending, domestically (in a domestic scene where the FBI was engaging in a death squadish project called COINTELPRO while the CIA was engaging in systematic illegal activities called, among other things, Operation Chaos) with Watergate.

It is a fact that rightwing politicians are trying to rewrite or forget the racist history of the U.S. by attacking critical race theory in schools – and it is also a fact that centrist-liberals are engaged in rewriting a history of the U.S. government that assigns doubts about the veracity of the government, the press, or the establishment in general to the precincts of the conspiracy theory set. In other words, both sides work very hard to distort U.S. history. The facts, for instance, about CIA links to narco-rich warlords in Laos are wished aside in the nice pink picture the ethicist has of the sixties. The fact that the government, at many levels, poisoned and drugged black men – for instance, in the MKUltra experiments with LSD supervised by Harris Isabel in Lexington, Kentucky – just isn’t in the picture. Nor are the literally hundreds of thousands of cancers caused by fallout from atom bomb tests that were performed by the government in the 1950s and sixties, the effect of which was strenuously denied by the relevant government agency, the AEC, while secretly AEC scientists were sounding the alarm about the effects of the fallout. Etc. While the NYT has cheerfully forgotten this history, popular culture has not. Just watch, say, Stranger Things, a popular show among teens, and you will have a more accurate view of the US government’s view of what one AEC document called the “low use” population than you will get from the collected ten year’s worth of the ethicist.

The struggle between fantasy histories of the U.S. is where we are at. You don’t have to chose one or the other.

the decline of the laugh

 

Jean Fourastié was one of the architects, in France, of the thirty glorious years of the postwar economy. He had reformed, or advised on the reformation of the French social insurance system in the thirties, and after the war he wrote optimistic books about the new world opened up by the consumer phase of capitalism. His predictions about the rising level of lifestyle seemed to be on target in the fifties and sixties, but somehow, Fourastié fell off the optimist wagon as he observed what consumerism had wrought – not a leisured and cultured working class in tandem with a leisured and cultured administrative class, but a mad rush towards disposable products and lifestyles that, in his view, had lost sight of, or even jettisoned, the volupté of satisfaction for the addictions to second degree wants that were manufactured by a new class of capitalist. The large mark of that turn was everywhere – in the environment, in the cultural impoverishment of non-urban areas, in the way in which busyness had infected all lives with addictions to perpetual scratching, as it were. The society of consumption turned out to be a society addicted to the itch.  As Regis Bolat puts it in his essay on Fourastié ‘s pre-1968 turn (one similar to Galbraith’s in the late fifties):

Fourastié thus painted a portrait of a “new homo economicus” of whom the essential trait is avidity. He saw in the indefinite growth of human needs what gave French society its preponderant characteristics and strongly conditioned the society of tomorrow. All research on consumption that took place in progressive countries seems to confirm this indefinite growth. Needs grow once the level of life is elevated: “no limit, no lassitude of the appetite of consumption, is what is always revealed by the statistics, whatever the amount of revenue expended.” In other words, Fourastié discovered that there was no internal limit within consumption, no horizon of satisfaction that allows the consumer, in a society in which consumables are subject to radical and rapid change and extension, to stop.

This is the background to Fourastié’s essay on the decline of laughter – or the laugh, le rire – in 20^th century ordinary life, Reflection sur le rire. Or, to put this in today’s terms, the decline of laughing out loud to LOL – an acronym that usually signals not laughing out loud, but pretend laughing out loud. Fourastié refers to Bergson’s treatise on the laugh as the classic work on the subject, but one that curiously neglects the psychological need to laugh. Being an economist, Fourastié is interested less in the individual’s psychology that the psychology of the collective. Whether or not the decline of the laugh really tracks the decline of “gaiety” in the street or the decline of laughing in the life of a man, Fourastié, who was approaching old age, his larger point about the utility, so to speak, of the laugh is worthy of his title.

Fourastié frames the laugh as a form of thought – or a form of thinking. “In fact, because laughter is a pheminon of joy and pleasure, the mechanism of the laugh engenders participaton in conceptual thought of instinctive forces.” This function is related to a more general notion of what is funny: “Every funny object presunts a “rupture of determinism”, a failure, a mini-conflect of sense and non-sense that the laugher must resolve by himself if he wants to laugh.” Laughter, in this view, or the object of the laugh, is a koan.

Fourastié was not the man to look at the intersectional victimage of the collective laugh – its policing of hierarchies.  But he is, I think, on target that laughter also addresses failure – a break in the logic of hierarchy.

I myself think that the gaiety of the Paris street has not really dimmed, although every account of the countryside and the far suburbs shows that this gaiety has turned sour.

Once, when I was a newfledged graduate student in the philosophy department at U.T., I had an experience of the laugh as omen. I was attending a class on Kant’s ethics. And the professor, a sweet man and one immersed in the atmosphere of anglo American philosophy at that time – analytic – mused one day that surveys didn’t seem to bear Kant out: people seemed less inclined to do things out of duty than to seek being happy. This way of putting things, which made it seem, suddenly, that normal people were outside of our circle, made me laugh. Except I couldn’t, since I was in the class and nobody else was laughing. This built my laugh up. The more I thought about it, the more absurd seemed the whole thing, and the class, and perhaps my being in philosophy itself. Whether I asked to excuse myself or we had a break, I don’t know. I simply remember walking up and down the hall in the building doubled over with laughter. Laughter is a power – it can seize a person. And especially a character such as myself, who have long been undermined in my efforts to be a serious person by a strong sense of absurdity.

I guess that laughter told me all I really needed to know about the unlikelihood, in my case, of an academic life.

 

War and loot

 I wrote this piece under Bad King Bush and his occupation of Iraq. I think it is ever so relevant now.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, William Hazlitt produced a polemic in his highest style that presented the classical liberal way of looking at war in an essay entitled “War and Taxes”. He begins with the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and proceeds to show that war falls under the latter category. However, even if a project is unproductive, it must be paid for somehow. It has a cost:

“If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars. The national debt is just the measure, the check-acount of the labour and resources of the country which have been so wasted – of the stones we have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from nine-tenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the happiness and liberty of the great mass of society, by which their resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness and their liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks, and the kick-shaws of legitimacy.”

This is a vivid and captivating idea. LI has often plugged into the notion that war is paid for by the loss of liberty.

The question is: is it a true idea? Does it really describe modern war?

Hazlitt wrote this in 1816. This is what had happened over the past two decades: France, after overthrowing the monarchy, had borrowed money to pursue its wars by liquidating the estates of the church and the nobility and divvying them up as paper. These assignats have a complicated history – in fact, the spider web of loans consolidated into mandats, which were divided between those to which the nation pledged its sacred purpose to redeem and those that were, in fact, left unredeemed – in other words, a form of bankruptcy – plunged European markets into chaos and has plunged every succeeding generation of economic historians, seeking to understand the system, into chaos too. Suffice it to say that the interest on the loans to the French created pressure on the English, so that Pitt was forced to suspend the gold standard, and designed a great system for floating loans to conduct the war – conduct which involved, among other things, financially supporting the opponents of France, Austria and Prussia. By 1815, the National Debt seemed overwhelming.

To the average textile worker or artisan, the English economy must have looked hopeless in 1816. Add to that, in Hazlitt's case, the extinction of his hopes for liberty. Hazlitt supposedly wandered around in a daze after Waterloo. He could not get over the return of the Bourbons, the repression of liberty, and the seeming return of the revolutionary energies unlocked by 1793 to the dungeon of history. On all of these counts, he was... well, not utterly wrong, but definitely not right in foreseeing the apocalypse. Britain was about to expand as never before. To see why, one has to put the British system of financing the great wars against France in an even larger context – that of the British system that had brought England not only back into European history since 1688, but that made England – a relative non-entity in terms of world power in 1688 – the greatest world power a mere century later. The rise of Britain is a mystery shrouded in the complacent assumptions we bring to the idea that the British empire was some kind of eternal thing, or that the British were a well respected European power. They were respected mainly for their pirates until the Stuarts, a subsidy of Louis XIV, were chased out. How did they become such an event?

Lawrence Stone, in “An Imperial State at War; Britain from 1689 to 1815” puts the issues into a liberal political form that Hazlitt would have appreciated:

“It is only very recently that historians have begun to study this paradox of, on the one hand, the use of massive external military empire to block a rival hegemonic power and to create a maritime trading power and, on the other, the preservation of internal liberty and the rights of private property – a rare combination only paralleled by Periclean Athens and America from 1941 to the present day. Judith Sklar described 18th century Britain as ‘a commercial, extensive, non-military, democracy disguised as a monarchy.” This is largely, but not entirely, correct.” Stone points out that the non-military part disguised the use of mercenaries – he doesn’t correct the democracy part, which is obviously insane. And he writes: It is also true, however, that British politics and society were bound to be deeply affected by a prolonged war with France. In order to win, the ruling elite were prepared to spend immense amounts of treasure and also torun up the national debt on a scale comparable only to the activities of the Reagan-Bush administrations in the United States.” The comparison in that last sentence is severely understated. The U.S. during the Reagan-Bush years contained a manufacturing stock undreamt of in the 18th century, as well as a wholly transformed sector of human capital that is hard to compare to a society in which bare literacy was the norm.

Hazlitt and in some way Stone speak of war, then, purely in terms of a cost – a waste. The accursed portion, the sacrifice, to use the more elevated rhetoric of Bataille. In this way of thinking, the older notion of war – war as looting – is left behind. The looting system is divorced from the new system of paying for war – which was the genius of the British system. From 1688 – the year that James II was deposed – onward, the British instituted a two tier system for paying for war – short term loans that would be repaid by long term loans. In this way, the British were able to get past the limits traditionally imposed by direct payment for war. Instead, the British steadily cultivated a national debt that was composed almost entirely of old loans, consolidated into long term ones, for an endless series of wars. But loans aren’t merely negative things – if they were, nobody would loan, and there would be no bond market. Rather, by producing a lively bond market, the English spread the debt for their wars around. To do this, the state had to perform a one/two step – on the one hand, centralizing organization enough to manage wars, and on the other hand, decentralizing finance to the extent of divvying its debts up among the upper bourgeoisie. Thus, when France, with its autocratic model of government and its dysfunctional parliamentary system, suffered untold misery trying to pay for its part in this series of wars, the British, whose debt to GDP ration was on some accounts worse than France, flourished.

Loot had not been forsaken as a motive to war. On the contrary, by 1794, the British were in possession of India and bleeding it for all it was worth. But the art of looting had gone up to another level.

The system wasn't, of course, flawless. Even the most beautiful system of finance does face the fact that payment must be made on debt. Here is another area in which war can have an unexpectedly blessed result. One of the takers on the British bonds was the Dutch, which had the most developed financial infrastructure on the Continent. What it did not have was a large army. When, in the 1790s, the French threatened Holland, the Dutch naturally turned to the British. Eventually the French occupied Holland, with the Dutch banks fleeing before them and relocating in London. By 1815 London had displaced Amsterdam as the world center of banking.

All of which is a way of saying that the distinction Hazlitt makes, the distinction that is still made, between productive and unproductive labour, is a much softer distinction – and is sometimes no distinction at all – than Hazlitt, and after him a whole liberal tradition, would like to be the case. As the Cambridge Economic History of Europe puts it, nicely: “Already in the eighteenth, more strongly in the nineteenth century, there existed among the British population a wealthy section capable and willing to invest part of its income in state bonds. Between 1761 and 1820, about 305 per cent of British public expenditure was financed from this source; between 1689 and 1820 the proportion did not fall as low as 29.5 per cent. This section of the population derived from these loans an income in the form of annual interest which grew to a substantial independent source of incomes within the total economy. Interest due to the wealthier section of the population was defrayed via the budget mainly from revenues derived from indirect taxes, paid overwhelmingly by sections of the population in receipt of lower incomes.”

The new system of financing war produced a whole new system of looting. The wealthy, in the anglosphere, have never forgotten this lesson. Those in “receipt of lower incomes” have never, ever learned it. And the liberals pretend, by and large, that it never happened.

From Herzen to Lenin and beyond: national self-determination (or how to think about Ukraine)

 

In 1914, there was a dispute between Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin about the proper revolutionary view of the right to self-determination. Luxemburg dismissed the aspiration for independent statehood as a mask or strategy for maintaining bourgeois domination against the working class. She deduced from this that nothing was gained if, for instance, Poland became independent of Russia and regained its autonomy. Nationalism, for Luxemburg, was a trap and a bauble.

Looking back, Luxemburg’s position must have arisen not just because of her theoretical take on internationalism as the necessary precedent of a communist revolution, but also because of her experience in a Germany that had only recently unified and that was filled with an excessive nationalism, an emotional attachment to German power (as embodied in the military) that was dangerous and antithetical to the Socialist Democracy ideal.

Lenin, on the other hand, had a strong sense of Russia’s imperialist role in subordinating the regions by violence. When we read, say, Tolstoy’s Hajid Murad now, we don’t think of the ethnic cleansing of the Caucasus that was the basis of the wars and raids Tolstoy was writing about. But that ethnic cleansing was the preferred strategy of the Czarist state. Lenin was not shy about following a progressive line that had gotten Herzen in trouble: opposition to Great Russian nationalism, and support for a commonwealth of nations in the Russian sphere. The Polish rebellion of 1863 had sparked an ultranationalist reaction in Russia and a closing down not only of progressive dissent, but – surprisingly – dissent even from Dostoevsky’s journals, Vremia, which was closed down by the Czar. Herzen wrote:

“The situation of poor Poland is painful, but it will not perish. Europe is too divided in this moment and it is on this disaccord in general that Petersburg grounds all its hopes. However, the Polish question is already pushed so far that for the European powers is it as dangerous to do nothing for it as it is difficult to come to Poland’s aid. I think that after the second refusal [to desist] by the Saint-Petersburg chancellory, France, England and Austria will recognize Poland as a “belligerent party”. I hope Poland can last out this winter with the aid of arms and other aid which will openly arrive to them from Galicia.”

This is the background for Lenin’s great defence of a justified nationalism in the context of a militant worker’s internationalism.  You can read all about it in the thicket of Lenin’s collected works, volume 20 – which can be found in any well stocked used book store in Europe, where the fall of the Berlin Wall caused a great wave of book trades from former leftists: the collected works of Mao, of Enver Hoxa, of Stalin, of Lenin, of even our heroes Marx and Engels, all in dull colors, coffins of past revolutions.

The heart of Lenin’s notion of the nation-state is found in the polemic with Rosenburg entitled “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, written in 1914 before the fatal August.

 

In the leaps which all nations have made in the period

of bourgeois revolutions, clashes and struggles over the

right to a national state are possible and probable. We

proletarians declare in advance that we are opposed to Great-

Russian privileges, and this is what guides our entire propaganda

and agitation.

In her quest for “practicality” Rosa Luxemburg has lost

sight of the principal practical task both of the Great-Russian

proletariat and of the proletariat of other nationalities:

that of day-by-day agitation and propaganda against all

state and national privileges, and for the right, the equal

right of all nations, to their national state. This (at present)

is our principal task in the national question, for only in

this way can we defend the interests of democracy and

the alliance of all proletarians of all nations on an equal

footing.

Lenin is no philosopher, but here his notion of dialectic serves him well, helping him avoid the idea that internationalism and the national question are on opposite sides. In the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the emergence of Great-Russian nationalism – first under Yeltsin in Chechnya, then under Putin in all the guises of aggression he has promoted – is solidly anti-Leninist. In fact, it seems that Putin’s aggrieved sense of Great Russian history puts Lenin in the devil’s role, once again – a version of history that should be familiar to the American intelligence services and State Department, since they hired beaucoup anti-communists to broadcast just that message via Radio Free Europe for about forty years.

Lenin consistently supported the principle of secession. And he did so particularly for regions like Ukraine:

The position of the “bureaucracy” (we beg pardon for

this inaccurate term) and of the feudal landlords of our

united-nobility type is well known. They definitely reject

both the equality of nationalities and the right to selfdetermination.

Theirs is the old motto of the days of serfdom:

autocracy, orthodoxy, and the national essence—the

last term applying only to the Great-Russian nation. Even

the Ukrainians are declared to be an “alien” people and

their very language is being suppressed.

For “bureaucracy” here one can substitute secret police or simply police. Putin is, above all else, the product of a subculture of policing. His version of history is the narrow Russian  cops version of history – and, given the variables, an almost universal cop view of history. From the president of Russia to the mayor of New York City, the variables are filled in by different objects, but the system is the same. In 1919, fighting for the principle of self-determination against Bolshevist cirtics, Lenin put this cop view more pithily: “Scratch any communist…and you find a Great Russian Chauvinist. He sits in many of us and we must fight him.”

The Cold War slant on Lenin’s dialectical position was that it was all a trick. Underneath that groovyness about self-determination was the ruthless Machievellian accruing Soviet, ie Great Russian power. And indeed, Lenin’s successors did manage their program in that way. Still, the strain from Herzen to Lenin never died on the Left. Until, of course, the Left itself died and was buried in the Universities of the world.

Monica's juvenalia (or do I mean juvenilia?)

 

- by Karen Chamisso

1

Cherchez the bitch! Cherchez the bitch!

And all the elders go tsk tsk tsk.

2.

Monica Lewinski, I think of you!

I’m just such another dixiecup ingenue

And have loved to bask in some Nero’s eye

Who never stuck a finger in my pie

Ending up saying, ”it depends on what sex is”

-their mothers all raised them to be little Elvis.

Cherchez the bitch! Cherchez the bitch !

3.

Were transcribed in the Elders report

“oh (sigh). Oh (sigh). Oh.”

Swinging his dick like a pirate in port

Waiting for a shipload of cargo

While all the Neros chase around all their desks

The immanently gropeable, babes babes babes

You were the witch, the problem, the dress

And your friends are all FBI slaves.

4.

Ces murs mêmes, seigneur, peuvent avoir des yeux ;

Et jamais l’empereur n’est absent de ces lieux.

Put that down in your debutante’s daybook.

And never let them in to look.

Cherchez the bitch! Cherchez the bitch !

And all the elders go tsk tsk tsk.

Notes on the Gnostic historian

There is a certain kind of skepticism that nests like an ominous crow in the branches of cultural relativism. It is aimed at all the myths and motifs that are used in the hegemonic strata of Western intellectual life – or, taking the nuts and bolts out of my mouth, by orthodoxy, by everything that cultural relativism, since Herder, has sought to take down – Western superiority, a narrow sense of reason, a vulgar notion of progress, all of it. Thus, in the sixties and seventies, when cultural relativism was particularly strong, there were a number of claims that such diverse social phenomena as the practice of cannibalism or the Mafia or European witchcraft were myths. They didn’t exist. There are powerful reasons to take this point of view, as almost always, the existence of the phenomena in question legitimate various forms of repression by established power.

Those reasons, for those who lived in the twentieth century, fell out of the sky, and sent the trains to the barbed wire camps, all as ‘defensive measures’ against an all powerful, and as we know, mythical enemy. Given this disastrous history, given these non-existent enemy others who were glued to the bodies of millions and incinerated in the furnaces, certain historians – notably Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millenium is one of the great books in my life – looked back and traced the pattern of fake conspiracies and fictitious entities in Western life back to the Roman era. In a sense, this was a sort of anti-gnostic history.

The insight here is that the powers that be create magic narratives of danger and threat, that they have magic mirrors on the wall, behind which they operate the switches and buttons, also goes back a long way – back to Machiavelli at least, or perhaps to Gyges. In King Lear, the disabused, perfect Machiavellian, Edmund, a bastard and thus by birth an outlaw, confects, out of little hints, Edgar’s plan to take his father Gloucester’s life. His lucidity – which dissolves all traditional bonds (such as the difference between legitimacy and bastardy) and superstitions, such as the connection of the earth to the stars, is the background against which we see him commit his treacheries with the comic glee of one of Shakespeare’s minor hitmen, those spawn of fairground puppet devils:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit

of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star! My

father compounded with my mother under the

dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa

major; so that it follows, I am rough and

lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,

had the maidenliest star in the firmament

twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--

Enter EDGAR

And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old

comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a

sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. “

This view of power as manipulated by an absolutely skeptical consciousness that has, as a preliminary to its move, dissolved all pacts with the stars, all differences of birth, has leveled the world to its bare bones and yet – the inexplicable last undissolved illusion – wants to rule over those bones is itself the kind of thing that should prompt our skepticism. Granting that moral panics can be generated in much the way that a movie director can generate a windy scene – using machines that the camera never films – we imagine that those who claim that these fictitious conspiracies and organizations – the Jew, the Witch, the Trotskyite – exist, and work their subterranean evil everywhere, are totally aware of the off-camera machinery. Surely the potter knows his pots. This view, however, is mystifying in its own way. We can find real equivalents for the theatrical cynicism of an Edmund in our history – we can cull statements from Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini, etc, and take them as sudden illuminations of the arcana imperii – but in doing so, we mirror the tendency we are fighting against, we endow our creatures with a consciousness that has no unconscious, that is impervious to its own mythmaking, that is all machine and no ghost.

I find this interesting because I have come to think that there is a subset of the historic method that I’d like to call Gnostic history – a history of secrets, connections, surface patterns that we have no one viewpoint to see and track . However, this label itself is a bit suspect, in as much as the current literature on the Gnostics tends – as is the case for the literature on the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution, etc. – at the moment to dissolve the very category. Just as there was no Renaissance and no Industrial Revolution, there is no Gnosticism. Karen King, in What is Gnosticism, my guide to the current scholarship, comes dangerously close to endorsing this kind of demolition job. The historiography that ends up here is understandable in some ways. When you read the exegetes, busy dissolving the texts of the Gnostic corpus, it is a wonder and an astonishment. Some postulate a complexity to the making of the texts at Nag Hammadi that would make a a particle physicist proud. Often, the assumptions seem a little, well, non-empirical. I’ve read some of the scholarship about the Gospel of Thomas which takes the fact that it contains ‘doublets”, or passages that repeat each other, as proof that it must have been compiled by many writers. Obviously, these scholars should ask an editor – such as moi – since it is rare that I edit a lengthy manuscript that doesn’t contain doublets.

King does one very good thing, and attempts to disentangle gnosticism from heresy. As the Gnostics were mainly known from the denunciation of them by various hepped up church fathers, it is hard not to think of them through that lens – a lens that takes all their writings as a reaction formation to orthodoxy. This lends the Gnostic culture the satisfying heroism of “resistance” – a good word that, by being grossly exaggerated and emulsified, denied any pragmatic measure but that of virtue signaling, has become resistance kitsch. In fact, when we go back early enough, there is no reason to think that orthodoxy is a very good description for what is going on in the spread of the Jesus cult – and its taking into itself other floating notions about salvation – changing one’s life – in the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, what did the Gnostics think, anyhow? One persistent motif has to do with a certain dualism vis-à-vis creation. The world, in this framework, was created by a lesser god, the child of Sophia. Not necessarily an evil one – but certainly lesser, and certainly not all knowing. He doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Lovely Eve discovers this when the helpful serpent suggests eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was not a sin – but the first revelation. This gives us the Gnostic historian’s equipment – a suspicion about the framework of matter or appearance, the notion that the fundamental elements are the hidden and the plain, the secret and the truth, sides – in other words, the jagged sense that the world isn’t finished and the glorious delusion that what will finish the world is one’s history of it. The demiurge, for the cool Gnostic, is authority itself in all its helplessness – weaving violence out of its vulnerability. The Gnostic historian proceeds with a film noir sense of the world, in which the femme fatale is actually Sophia’s embodiment here on earth.

Stevan Davies, in an article about the Gospel of Thomas (1983), made a case for it as a fifth gospel. It is a striking text, in that it takes the important thing about Jesus to be what he said. This way of understanding Jesus has, of course, been displaced – it seems to us that there is no contradiction between the Church being a defender of the family and the son of God that this church worships, even though Jesus is much more scathingly anti-family than, say, Rimbaud – there is no giving and receiving of wives and husbands in the Kingdom, and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.” This contempt for the family exhibited in Jesus’ every recorded gesture is simply not considered important. It was, however, before the cult erased the person, and the Gospel of Thomas, while lacking any real sense that the important thing about Jesus was that he was resurrected, is full of the sense that the new life begins by breaking utterly with the old rules.

How to think about these things?

“Thomas preserves at least two parables which almost certainly come from Jesus but which exist in a kind of pre-church purity. They allow one, in all likelihood, to hear Jesus without the whispers of centuries encouraging particular interpretations. Here is 97:

Jesus said, the Kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman who was carrying a jar which was full of meal. While she was walking on a distant road, the handle of the jar broke, the meal spilled out behind her onto the road. She did not know; she was not aware of the accident. After she came to her house, she put the jar down; she found it empty.”

The jar – which she didn’t notice – the crumbs in the road – the empty container. The Gnostic historian is like that woman whose things have slowly trickled away from her, every step she takes, leaving a trail behind her for the birds of the air to eat – all of this without her knowing it. Lose everything.