From a notebook entry about Kafka

 

When Josef K. was around twenty two, his last year at the university, he discovered the existence of a secret society which counted certain students and even professors among its adherents. In fact, it didn’t resemble other secret societies. It was very difficult for certain people to become members. Many, who ardently wanted to become a member, never succeeded. Others, by contrast, became members without trying, or even knowing that they had become members of this society. One was never, besides, totally sure of being a member. There were many who believed they belonged to it and weren’t, in fact, members at all, or were members in name only. However much they had been initiated, they were less part of the society than many who didn’t even have the slightest knowledge of the existence of the society. In fact, the former had undergone the tests of a false initiation, the rituals of which were as codified as those of a true initiation: the false initiation was designed to put off the scent those who were unworthy of being initiated, but who had somehow found out about the secret society. But even the most authentic members, those who had reached the most elevated places in this society, did not know whether their initiation was authentic or not. This was a secret that could not be revealed. It could happen that a member attained, due to a series of authentic initiations, a real rank, and that consequently, without being warned or in any way becoming objects of the confidence of those who supposedly knew these things, they would be instructed to initiate others under the belief that they, being authentic initiates, were licensed to oversee authentic initiations, only to actually oversee false initiations.

Thus, it became the subject of innumerable conversations among the membership whether it was better to be admitted to a lesser but real level in the hierarchy or to occupy an exalted position, but an illusory one, that is, one contaminated with a false initiation somewhere along the path to that high position. In any case, no one was sure of the solidity of their level, and from this arose the ambiguities that surrounded the legitimacy of orders or suggestions issued within the secret society by those who supposedly ran the society.

And, in fact, the situation was even more complicated than this relatively simple divide between false and true initiations make it seem. Certain postulants were admitted to the highest levels without undertaking any tests. Others were invested with offices and powers that they did not even know about, since they could not be told. Who, after all, was certain enough of his or her own rank to tell them? And, frankly, there was no need to be a postulant: certain elevated officers didn’t even know the secret society existed, even though these officers had to be respected if they issued a command.

The powers of the superior members were unlimited; they carried in themselves, in their own presence, a kind of emanation of the secret society as a whole. This emanation had strange powers. For instance, just being in the presence of one of these people was enough to transform an banal meeting or encounter – say, the encounter defined by going up to the counter of a coffee bar and ordering a latte – into a meeting of the secret society. Similarly it could transform a birthday party or a concert into a meeting of the society. From that time afterwards, all the humans present at such occasions became living links within the society to other members. In this way, the extent of the secret society was enormous, and if power corresponded simply to extension, than the secret society was certainly the most powerful secret society that ever existed, at least in this society.

However high the level of the initiation, it was never permitted to inform the initiate of the purpose pursued by the secret society. But there have always been, given the principles governing initiation, and the promiscuity that comes with size, some initiates who were actually informers or traitors, and it was from these that the rumor took root that the goal of the society was to keep its purpose secret. As these informers and traitors could, actually, have been double agents, there has been discussion about, and even papers written to prove, that the purpose of the society was actually guarded by having traitors and informers broadcast the purpose of the society.

Josef K. was horrified to learn that this secret society was so large and so manifold, and even more to learn that he might, without knowing it, be a member of the society, and even a powerful member at that. The latter possibility implicated him in making others, say, those attending a birthday party he attended, members of the secret society; he pondered whether, morally, he had a duty to call up the people at various parties he had attended and warn them that they might, by being in contact with him, been recruited into this secret society. On the other hand, calling people up like this could be construed as betraying the secrets of the society, and this posed the question as to whether he had the moral right to do this.

Such was his position after the day he lost his ticket to the metro, which was the first link in the confusing and contradictory chain of circumstances that put him in contact with the secret society, whose existence until then he had been unaware of.

Para-history

 

 

In the Wolfgang Promies edition of Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher, the beginning note in notebook A, which could be the beginning of this “book”, such as it is, reads: “The great art of making small deviations from the truth in order to get to the truth, on which the whole differential calculus is built, is at the same time the foundation of our most brilliant [witzigen] thoughts, where often the whole thing would collapse if we took the point of view of philosophical strictness in relation to the deviations.”

This is a great way to begin a “waste book” that is no book – neither a book of maxims on the order of the French moralists nor a diary nor an essay, but a mix of all three - and it is also a motto for a certain genre that I would call the “para-historical”.

Writers of all types – bloggers, Sunday researchers, journalists, memoirists – “do” history, but do it outside the strict methodologies and judgments of real historians – academic historians. The latter are absolutely necessary, of course, but the para-historian can provide a “brilliant” thought here and there which casts a light on the past. Especially in as much as history is necessarily burdened with factoids – the cops lies that get into a folder in the archive, a politician’s misquote, a partisan’s distortions, etc. Para-historians are, of course, also prone to factoids – often they pass them on as part of a whole agenda. And para-historians have other problems, too: the emphasis on the anecdotal and the downplaying of context, for instance. The attraction to “mysteries” rather than problems. And the parallel attraction to “solutions”.

I’ve spent a good few years writing a series of factoidal stories, parahistories of a sort. Mine cover the Cold war era. Even that term is an unreliable designator – what kind of war is it? If a war exists where none is declared, but rather polities are hostile to each other, than all eras are eras of Cold War. Hostility is the total story. I think, however, that the Cold War, from whatever beginning date you argue for to whatever ending date you argue for, is distinguished by the way in which the hostility of nations is routinized in ideologies that motivate populations to sponsor them: pay for them, fight for them, make others fight for them, etc. From this point of view, the Cold War as a form started in 1789, with the French revolution, and found its perfect counterrevolutionary expression in Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke’s pamphlet is at the head of a tradition in Anglophony that one can follow even up to now – the premise that no peace, no coexistence is possible with the ideological enemy. This realigns the nation’s interests in an interesting way – for if the ideology of the Other is the enemy, than those within the nation who adhere or lean towards that ideology are also the enemy.

And so I have concentrated on various crimes that have to do with that simple formula, as it complexified and fortified itself over the time, relatively, that I have been alive.

Christ and Degenerate Art

- I direct your attention to inventory no. 16232, a giant wooden Kruzifixus, accused of Judeo-Bolshevism, from the atelier of one L.G. by way of a Museum in Stettin.

- O. I am beginning with an “I”. Begin. Begat. Begone.

- An inventory number implies an inventory. The number of art objects seized by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939 within the German speaking sphere — Anschluss Austria, conquered Czechoslovakia — is still unknown. But 16232 is a large number. Does it really reflect the number of art pieces seized? Inventories don’t necessarily reflect a number line. For instance, zip codes are a form of inventory. In this case, Mario Andreas von Luttichau has studied the matter and concluded that the inventory numbers that were assigned “coincided to some extent with the sequence of works in the exhibition…” — in other words, operated a bit like zip code numbers. Still, as there was only around 630 some works in the Munich museum, the original sequence, which specified the works, must have come from some other sequence — something having to do with their seizure by the Nazi state. More than 16,000 objects, it seems.

- The Nazi state. I write this, I draw back. Is this a subject that will get inside my dreams? There is more than possible. I remember in the sixth grade, my friend Mike showed me a book about Hiroshima. For months I dreamed of naked people in boiling rivers, their skin sliding from their bones. And these were not only nightmares but wet dreams. Naked people, to my sixth grade mind’s eye, naked women. There is no line, no traumatic DMZ, that will keep the images of all the horrors of the world awake from the world asleep, the world of the sleeper. And I begin to be conscious of my intrusion here, looking back on these things, and this crucifix, this crucified one. Many a vodou metaphysician has noticed that the instrument of torture that became a symbol of Christ is, as well, a cross roads. It marks the spot where the devil, or where Papa Legba, can be met at midnight, in the midst of the traffic between the quick and the dead.

- My “I”, lofted above this story, is illegitimate in many respects; but then I remember my citizenship in the Great Cold War. My history, too. My nightmares and wet dreams.

- The inventory number is helpfully supplied by the book accompanying the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, in 1991, of the “Degenerate Art Exhibit” of 1937. The show as it opened in Munich. The Munich show and its successors — it travelled through the major German cities and those in Austria after the Anschluss, 13 cities in all — was one of the most visited exhibitions of the 20th century, attracting “more than two million people”. The advertising for it was extensive and enticing. “Free admittance. No young people allowed entry.” The papers did front page stories about it whereever it went. Orders from on high? The “show” travelled to Austria, after the Anschluss. A great success.

2.

- “Vandalism In Church” reads the headline in the local newspage of the March 4, 1922 Lübeck Volksbote, a socialist newspaper. The gist: a person or persons had penetrated the Lübeck Cathedral (which was latter to be almost destroyed in a British raid on the city in 1942) carrying equipment that included a ladder, a saw, and a rope. They climbed up to the Kruzifixus, which had been installed on the wall above the area that led into the choral space, and sawed off its head. They used a rope to lower the heavy wooden head to the ground and made off with it — packing up their equipment, too. As well, they injured the nimbus and the rays that highlighted the body. Shortly thereafter: “The head was found in a nearby wastepond. Chained to a stone.”

- Begin. Begat. Begone.

- The newspaper reported that before this ultimate act of vandalism, there had been a great deal of controversy and misinformation about the Kruzifixus. The congregation was disturbed by it. The veteran’s groups were disturbed about it. The Blätter, another Lübeck paper, but which leaned to the right, ran some angry columns about it, using the language that was to reappear, in 1933, as the Nazis started gathering up the art they didn’t like and denouncing the art professors, curators, artists and patrons who produced, exhibited and bought it: it was blasphemous, it mocked the German military, it was ugly, it was insane. Jesus was too dead, too tortured, too big, too hideous.

- There was a rumor that the Kruzifixus had won a contest being held by the Church to select a monument for the German war dead. In fact, it had been submitted, but the statue had not been accepted by the monument committee. However, the Lübeck Cathedral’s artistic advisor, a man named Carl George Heise, had advocated for the statue, and had approved L.G.’s plan for it. Consequently, he made it in his atelier in Berlin, working on it for four months. The statue, made out of oak and in giant proportions — the figure was over nine feet high, the cross was even bigger — was originally supposed to be over a plaque listing the names of those in the congregation who had fallen in the war. L.G. intended this greenish, tortured, dead Jesus to reflect the painting of Jesus on the altar created by the Nordic early modern painter, Bernd Notke. Notke’s painting was created around 1500 (it no longer exists, as it was burned in the British raid on Lübeck in 1942 which destroyed the cathedral). The figure also had thin gilded rays emanating from it, and a gilded nimbus above its head.

- Thus we begin. Is this the story of the Kruzifixus? Or the story of L.G.? Or the story of the crossroads upon which the Kruzifixus gave its gallow’s blessing?

3.

- There are at least two tellers of the tale of the Kruzifixus in our time. One, Katrin Engelhardt, gives us the pertinent details in an article entitled “Nailed to the Cross: the mocking [Verhöhnung] of the Kruzifixus of L.G. in the Weimar Republic and under the Nazis”. It was published in a book that is part of a series concerning “entartete Kunst” — degenerate art — and the fate of outlawed art objects under the Nazis. There is an institution that researches this area of modern art history.

- The other teller is Hans Prolingheuer, a former Social Democratic politician who has devoted his post-legislative life to the exploration or explanation of the intersection between the Nazis and the protestant churches. The cross as crossroads, the exchanges between the sacred and the profane, or perhaps the demonic masked that characterized churchman and Gauleiter. Protestant churches, as observers after 1933 remarked, flourished in Berlin after the Nazis generally put Cabaret and all its attendees and showpeople in the KZ. Where once Weimar decadents watched transvestites and discussed (pro and contra) the communist party, there were now invitations to Christian worship for all — — except decadents, socialists, communists, Jews, Gypsies or Defectives. It is a history of great shame, and like all great shames in the post-war period, when the Cultural Bolshevik enemy shapeshifted, it was felt less by those who had participated in it in the thirties, busy now creating a “miracle” economy, than the grandchildren, waking up like Hansel and Gretel and listening as, beyond the wall, the parents speak in whispers of murder. Prolingheuer feels intensely for the Kruzifixus. For Polingheuer, L.G.’s sculpture lies at the center of the ghastly connection between the Stormtroopers — Sturmabteilung — and the Bildstürmer — the iconoclast. The destruction of images, which occurred, as Polingheuer remarks, in the surge of popular piety in the German countryside around Luther’s break with the Church, was a compound of frenzies we have seen before and will see again, a matter of the same sexual angers and salts, of vengeance and profittaking: then, the destruction of witches, heretics, Jews; in 1937, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, and other degenerates.

4.

- Begin. Begat. Begone. Words that, as I pronounce them, have a deal of spit in them.

- The week the Kruzifixus was beheaded was a redletter week for the Lübeck intelligentsia. It had been declared Thomas Mann week by the city’s Cultural department. Lübeck’s great son came back to Lübeck — he now lived in Munich — and made a speech at the dedication to the House of the Buddenbrooks. The very house itself, which had been purchased by some patron and dedicated to the great artist.

- Carl Georg Heise was already writing, of inventory number 16232, fourteen years before it was reinstalled for maximum mockery at the entrance to the 1937 exhibition: “One hardly knows what is more significant, the work or its fate.”

- Heise was writing in Genius, the journal he briefly edited. He was writing after the Kruzifixus had been vandalized, which happened a mere month after it was installed in the Lübeck Dom. Heise writes: “Its destruction is a testimony to the increasing difference of feeling between the popular sentiment and the artistic culture of our time. It is a dangerously intensifying situation in which we find ourselves.” Heise also wrote of the deep religious feeling that was expressed in this Crucifixion. The quote was pulled for the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 and hung, in a mauled state, on the all next to the Kruzifixus, with a graffiti question mark scrawled over it.

- Carl Georg Heise was a pupil of Aby Warburg. He was not simply an observer of the situation in Lübeck, since he had advocated for the statue as an artistic advisor to the cathedral. He was also the head of the Lübeck Museum of Art and the History of Culture. The post gave him the opportunity to patronize many contemporary artists. In this post, he became one of the great patrons of the sculptor Barlach. “Following… a radio address Barlach gave in January of 1933, protesting the expulsion of Kollwitz and Heirich Mann from the Preussische Akademie, he was forced to give up the house he had built in 1930 in Guestrow, ostensibly because the building permits had been declared null and void and were withdrawn.” Barlach had two works in the Degenerate Art Exhibit.”

- Heise and L.G. “fell from grace” in 1933, after the Nazis seized power.

- A story. In 1933, the official in charge of “culture” was a certain Senator Burgsteller. The Nazis were all about delivering an immediate shock to the cultural system in Germany, and pressured to fire Heise. The Senator left Heise hanging for weeks. Then he agreed to meet with him.

- “My dear Heise, I am sure you must understand why we could not keep you on. It just could not be done. Look here, I need you to help and advise me. As you know, I am no expert in this area, but I have to appoint a successor to you, a man who will carry on in your spirit. Who would you suggest?”

- Heise gave him a list of names.

- “Soon after, he met a man from the Senator’s office, who told him with a grin: don’t you see? Those were the names of candidates I had to cross off the list immediately. (Hellmut Lehman-Haupt).

- Heise must have been there to meet Mann in Lübeck on Thomas Mann week. He’d met Mann in 1921. In 1933, he went to Switzerland to see Mann about emigrating. Mann urged him to stay in Germany, on the assumption that the Nazis would not last forever and an indigenous strain of humanism would then re-emerge. Perhaps Mann thought of Heise when he imagined his humanistic narrator of Doctor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblum.

- Heise asked Mann to write on behalf of art that was being attacked in Germany in 1933. Mann told Heise he was not good with modern art — he was an Ohrmensch — an Earperson.

5.

- The feuillitonists or art critics who might have mocked or grown indignant at the way Germany’s national treasures, all those modern works that were purchased by the progressively inclined curators and directs, were either fired in 1933 and working some other job or in concentration camps or in exile.

- “The wound like a hole out of which a drop of blood falls.” “The giant toes of the feet.” “The impressively overlong legs.”

- In Los Angeles, in the 90s, many of the 615 pieces shown in Munich could not be shown. They had disappeared. That might mean they had been deliberately destroyed. Or it might mean that they had been sold by the network of dealers that sprang up in Europe to take advantage of the Nazi war on Modern Art to acquire and sell pieces. In 1991, archaeologists digging in Berlin, searching for remnants of its distant 14th century past, uncovered a storage room buried underground, among the rubble of some bombardment. In the room were ceramic pieces and a broken statue — Otto Freundlich’s statue, Der neue Mensch, a photograph of which had adorned the cover of “the guide published to accompany the exhibition on tour after it left Munich.” Otto Freundlich’s own ashes disappeared long ago in the Maidenek, in 1943.

6.

- 1937. Note that one of the great landmarks of Nazi cultural policy occurred in a distinctly depressing year for the great hopes of modernism. If we travel, at that date, to Moscow, we can enjoy the beginning of the great Show Trials, in which the cadre of Bolsheviks who participated in and made the Revolution were duly humiliated and, after being found guilty of Capital Crimes, executed. The defendants themselves often pleaded for the most severe sentences.

- The National Socialists had already liquidated as many of the German communist cadre as they could catch — a strategy of pacification that would have a long afterhistory, from Malaysia and Vietnam to Iraq and Guatemala, marking the twentieth century as a movement between Communists killing their enemies (often other Communists) and communists being killed in the name of democracy by the forces and proxies of the Western powers.

- 1937. The degenerate art exhibition was, in its own way, a show trial, and the object was to liquidate a certain kind of modernity in which the 1917 revolution figured. A modernity identified with negativity, squalor, critique, the “dérèglement de tous les sens” and a splendour that refused to share an ethos with heroism.

- Heroism had gone mad on the Western and Eastern Fronts. How much of a hero is the cow that is dragged up the chute to the slaughterhouse?

- Yet the Stalinist turn in Moscow, or the Nazi frenzy in Munich, was caught in the perpetual loop of exaggeration and denunciation that gives it its temperamental being, its trademark attitude. Thus it followed a zombie logic of mimicry. I mean that the Degenerate Art exhibition exhibited many of the tricks and traits of the great Dada installations, and used shock for its own purposes. For instance, the bizarre, swooping scripts on the wall pointing out and denouncing the pieces. Or “the juxtaposition of works of degenerate art by Karl Schmidt Rottluff and Amedeo Modigliani and photographs of facial deformities”. Or photographs of drawings and paintings by the mentally ill. All of which were, indeed, sources of inspiration. The muses live in jails, in asylums, on the street. And what does that mean for us, who do not?

- Who, as a footnote to this representational violence, were to be liquidated physically in the 38 to 40 period. All those muses. The defectives, to whom the doctors and nurses applied the needle. And of course after the Jews, Gypsies, Bolsheviks, Slavs, etc.

- The Dadaist assault was trained on the bourgeois spectator’s perceptual privacy, as though perception itself was a piece of property, a sort of lawn fronting the frockcoated peeper at the pics. The Dadaist glee was imitated, in all unconsciousness, by the organizers (Ziegler, Willrich, Hansen, Hoffman). What could be more Dada than to hang artworks crookedly on the wall? “A photograph of Hitler standing before the Dada Wall at a preview of the exhibition… reveals that the works by Schwitters, Kandinsky and Klee were originally hung crookedly on the wall.”

- In the Camps, all privacy was systematically taken from the inmate. No more of that. In the Degenerate Art exhibition, there was a sense that these works were being tortured for the benefit of the great German Aryan public. It was a pity, really, that nobody thought of putting in a shrieking sound system. The predecessor of the Exhibition, put on by the Nazis in 1934, had called itself a “house of horrors.” Carnivalesque dystopia.

7.

- Begone.

- From the “Administrative Report concerning the Hanseatic city of Lübeck from 1937 to 1952”: “Even more dramatic was the struggle to save the Cathedral… The fire leaped from the museum up the socalled Bishop’s tower of the Cathedral and spread from here through the whole church “ship”… Even the strengthened manpower in place could not control the fire.

- “On March 29, 1942, at around 10:30 a.m. the Northtower, which had stood until then, collapsed, breaking in the middle, and about 2 p.m. the South tower followed. Lübeck was again stripped of a landmark and one of its most valuable cultural monuments.” (Hans Brunswig, 1978)

- Begat. Ended. Turn out the lights, muses from the wards, the camps, the trains. Defectives. Human experiments. Horror shows of all kinds. Turn out the lights. Turn out the lights. Repeat, infinitely.

William James, Effective Altruism, and Sam Bankman-Fried

There is a passage in William James’ essay, The Moral Philosopher – which, by the way, is an excellent analysis of that species we now call the “pundit” or the opinion writer – which sums up the delusion called “effective altruism” and even predicts its course, from the principles it begins with:

 

“A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it, will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities. As a purely theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the best imaginable system of goods; he would indeed have an easy task; for all demands as such are prima facie respectable, and the best simply imaginary world would be one in which every demand was gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, "of n-﷓dimensions," to include all the acts and experiences incompatible with one another here below, which would then go on in conjunction﷓-such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create universes a priori, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.”

This is the set of motives that drove that EA excrescence, FTX, and its creator and monster, Sam Bankman-Fried. Frankenstein becomes his own monster, in a variant of Mary Shelley’s cautionary romance.

michael lewis agonistes

 

I have long liked Michael Lewis for one thing: the long essay he wrote after Hurricane Katrina about coming back to New Orleans. In that essay, he defended Nola from the foxification, that is, the racist demonization, that excused the inexcusable U.S. neglect of one of the world's great cities.

So, I felt I owe him one. Well, now the debt is paid. He "embeds' himself with SBF - already a vile and emptyheaded move for a reporter - and then gives us a portrait of a true privileged monster, a man who mistakes intelligence for the mastery of a few video games. A man with no ethics, no organization, and an insatiable greed. Who is his "hero". Whose innoncence, as he put it on Sixty minutes, is a thing he wants to communicate to the jury.

Michael Lewis is not, of course, the only one. The NYT coverage of SBF has leaned over backwards to tell his tale. This is a story of backstage image management that could only be explained by the fact that the parents of the involved know the media honchos who run the presses. But even with favorable NYT coverage - starting back from when they gave him a chance to "share" his story on their stage for some event after FTX fell apart - they are, reluctantly, covering the unfolding of eyewitnessed detail that pretty much sinks the image of Sam Effective Altruism Bankrobber-Fried. Lewis seems as clueless about cryptocurrency platforms as many people of his generation are about the Nigerian email scam.
Pathetic and so so typical.

The thing about that 60 minutes interview that is little commented is how bad the interviewer - Jon Wertheim - is. Whe Lewis says FTX collapsed because of a bank run situation, Wertheim should have stopped him and said FTX was not at all like a bank. A
bank is legally entitled to loan the money you deposit out. The FTX platform
was more like a safety deposit box. You are charged a fee for having the box,
but if the company actually opens the box and uses your stuff, that is called
theft. Pretty simple distinction. That Wertheim apparently knows NOTHING about
FTX makes me wonder - what is the use of television interviews? The NYT had a
story about the average age of network tv viewers now being like 65 - my age. I
think this is partly because tv viewers of a certain generation just got used
to this flatheadedness. But one of the wonderful things about social media and
cable is: this kind of bunk calls out to be de-bunked.

Who is Hamlet to him, or him to Hamlet?

The vogue for Hamlet in the 1920s is, I think, of piece with the culture of the 1920s: the wounded modernity of it all, from the Jazz age drinkers in New York city speakeasies to the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, etc. World War I showed the great and unspeakable harm of yoking together advanced technology and the senile intellection of the ruling class. The 1920s were despised, later, by people like Wyndham Lewis and reactionaries of all kinds partly due to its unstable mixture of deep mourning and sexual release.

Which was the perfect mood in which to read The Waste Land, or to compose it.

Eliot was producing a lot in the twenties, in order to supplement an income from the bank he worked at that would have been more than ample for another middle manager (500 pounds a year). But Tom and Viv pursued lifestyles that made more money a necessity. Besides, the Eliot of the time was overflowing with ideas. Which is why his essay on Hamlet, the one in which he deplored such mooks as Goethe for misunderstanding the whole failure of the thing, was, on the one hand, so outrageous, and on the other hand, was as close as his criticism came to his art. The Hamlet that he hammered at was all fragments and failure – Shakespeare’s Wasteland.

“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.3 The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most mis leading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on the play.”

What an astonishing last phrase! Eliot latter omitted this essay from some collection of his essays because it was so impertinent. Highhatting Goethe, Coleridge and Pater in one driveby is a display of sharp elbows that must have made the Edwardian sages, those still around, gasp.

The whole essay is full of other gasp-making passages. For instance, this one, on how clumsy Shakespeare bobbled his source, the (lost) Hamlet of Kyd, which was no doubt a real revenger play and no fooling around. “In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing.”

So much for those who think that the madness theme is all the more convincing for posing the question: what if a madman plays at being a madman, not realizing that he is truly mad? A question at the heart of early modern European literature – Hamlet, meet Don Quixote. This fold in the play made Hamlet a precursor of romanticism, and romanticism was something that the Eliot at this point, with his Maurrassian leanings, wanted rooted out – for reasons not unlike that of his old pal, Wyndham Lewis.

Lewis-like shock effects key passages like this one: “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.”

Sloppy Shakespeare, not able to cut and mend. Like, perhaps, Eliot in the midst of his first draft of the Wasteland? I love the “most certainly” of the artistic failure. There the teacher is, turning back the paper that little Will had worked so hard on. Alas, failure – and F!

“And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.”

Of course, the unconscious movement from dissing Pater – who thank God never wrote on Hamlet – to dissing Pater’s painting, his poem, the Mona Lisa – makes the essay all the more interesting as a good old St. Louis stomping. Behind the clerical fussiness there’s the riverside hustler. Eliot makes it clear that there are the cool people, who know what artistic success is, and the hoi polloi, who want the “interesting” – the crossword puzzle, the latest murder, Hamlet.

Eliot doesn’t mention Joyce. Lewis, who shared Eliot’s impersonality of the poet thesis at this time, would certainly have included some dig at J.J. – after all, the “character” of Hamlet figures as a major key in Ulysses. As Stephen might reply to Eliot’s irritated and irritating essay: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

It is in the Hamlet essay that Eliot lets loose upon the world (to his later dismay) the term “objective correlative.” Apparently he can’t find any in Hamlet. “The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”

It must be said that the “objective correlative” has a certain critical inevitability. Using it to beat up Hamlet, though, gives us a dramatic situation in which the critical emotion is “most certainly” in excess of the facts as they appear. Behind these facts, and this bitching, is Eliot coming into the hard realization – which he made into a worldview – that his was not a synthesizing mind, but a collaging one. Fragments were his poetry. And in his reduction of Hamlet to fragments, he gave himself a pretty good precedent.

philosophy as worry

 

Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so disinterested, so aristocratically outside the tangle of pleb emotions.

 

For these reasons, that origin story has, for the most part, been more interpreted than questioned.

 

It is, of course, hard to get clear on these things, which depend on self-reporting. Stories that one tells about oneself are, prima facie, self-interested.

 

Myself, my “philosophical” thinking has its roots more in worry than in wonder. Worry about the dark. Worry about abandonment.  Worry about money. Worry about sex. Worry about the parents, the kids, the growing old, the decline of empire, boredom, and the absence of the hosts of promised angels after you graduate from whatever it is you are graduating from.

 

Worry, of course, is socially gendered female. Worry is the knitting, it is mom, not stoic dad, wondering on the lawn.

 

Questions can be treated as innocent grammatical instruments. Science, y’all! But questions are where worry goes in language.  They are large things, the question – they have room for more than anxiety. But from my plebe view, wonder is simply the advance man of worry, the spokesmodel, worry as influencer.  

 

living in an essay: Musil

 

This is how Shaw, in the preface to Heartbreak House (1919),  summed up the ruling class in prewar  England:

“In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House of Commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went ; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.”

The war pulled back the curtains. The incredible lack of sense of the ruling class, of the industrialists, generals, journalists, academics and their like was only matched by their incredible smugness. The result of this intellectual catastrophe could be measured in the blood of the swampy battlefields of the Somme. The same story could be told of the other great powers engaged in the war: as for instance in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which underwent the horrors of the Eastern Front to defeats unimaginable at Czernowiz and the Siege of Przemyśl. Robert Musil served on the Italian front, so he was removed from where the meatgrinder of the Eastern Front,  and the newspapers, to Karl Kraus’s horror, tried to paper over the bloodshed with lies – however, the shocks of these events couldn’t be hidden. In Joseph Roth’s Radetzsky March, an officer cries out: “war is here! We’ve long expected it. Yet it surprised us.” Roth’s novel is all about the limbo into which Kakistan [Kaiser und Konig land]  army fell in its endless deployment at the edges of the empire. The officers, addicted to gambling, drink, and brothels in those border garrisons, did not form the kind of staff that would take maximum advantage in battle, or be very economical in spending the lives of their troops.

This is the background to Musil’s essayism – a sort of philosophical extension of the essay to an existentialist creed. In the Man without Qualities, which is set in the year before the outbreak of the war, the hero, Ulrich, considers the lack of any exact knowledge among the ruling class as it is amplified in the particular case of a murderer, Moosbrugger.  The trial of Moosbrugger fascinates Ulrich – just as the faits divers have fascinated intellectuals all down through the 20^th and 21^st century – for reasons he can’t quite put his finger on. It is as though this crime were symbolic of something deep in the social unconcious – but what? Is it something like what Ivan Karamazov called an “allegory” – an exemplary instance of a social malady. Here the experts called to judge Moosbrugger’s sanity make their diagnoses without either affirming or negating the question, before judges who have no knowledge of sociology or psychology, to decide the fate of a confused case of psychopathology.   The blind lead the blind lead the murderer, and at the end of the train there is the victim.
Chapter 62 – “The earth, and especially Ulrich, honor the utopia of essayism” – begins with Moosbrugger’s trial,  but leads discursively, as the topics in the Man without Qualities tend to, by a mysterious route of associations in the direction of Ulrich’s self-consciousness, and through that to the modern condition. Ulrich, when he was studying mathematics in his younger days, came upon a phrase – which, for intellectual twenty somethings, means more than just putting words together. A phrase is a discovery – as solid as a face. Ulrich’s discovery is of the phrase: to live hypothetically. That is, to take no incident in life as a conclusion, a fixed and final line in a proof, but rather to treat one’s certainties – the ego, the act, the social, the moral, the ontological, etc. – as hypotheses, conditionals waiting for proof. This young thought, Ulrich now thinks, is part of what he calls Essayismus.
There are people, we all know them, who live as though they were in a novel, or a drama. People who exist, somehow, within a certain lighting and soundtrack -to shift media. Ulrich is of the type who lives as though in an essay. “Approximately as an essay in the succession of its parts takes a thing up from many sides without grasping it whole – for a wholly grasped thing loses at once its breadth and melts into a concept – he believed it was the best way to look at and handle the whole world  and his own life.”

This puts more of an existential slant on “essayism”. I’m thinking about essayism as I read Brian Dillon’s book, Essayism, which doesn’t quite get down to the bedrock of Ulrich’s political-erotico-social position. Not that this counts against the book, which doesn’t have Musil’s ambitions – but I think it would be a nice problem to ponder – the essay’s invasion of the novel, and the sense abroad that the novel has lost its predominance – which, to me, simply means its attractiveness as a model for living your life.
I am behind the times, and made the decision, long ago, to live as though in a novel. So there is that.
 

The prophet essayist

There are essayists who, as Virigina Woolf puts it, relate their “I” to the “rheumatism in your left shoulder”; and those who relate it to “the immortality of the soul”.

Myself, I see a textual and genealogical difference between the two groups. The first are discursive, associative, and move outward to a world of doubts and quasi-comic situations. For the latter, it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living god. They are prophetic, apophantic, revelatory, assertive. In the prophetic tradition, Nineveh is always wicked, and will always pay for it in keeping with the wrath of God. We are always in the valley of bones, asking if these bones will live.

The former group are in it, ultimately, for the sport, the play, the sentiment. For every assertion there is a counter-example, and this is not to be met with some tremendous overthrow but with a certain modesty of scope. Universals will be used, but not to talk of the soul – rather, to talk of, say, the best way to roast a pig. We Nineveh-ians would do better to break down our experience see just how wicked we really have been, and whether we might be a bit more merciful than god itself about our sins.

I’m of course making a division of ideal types. I chose Nineveh to represent this wicked world because Jonah, one of the most attractive of the prophets, chose it as the object of his objection. Or rather had it chosen for him by the Lord. In the book of Jonah God, for the first time, seens to break the code of austerity of the prophet – seems in fact to tease him. As we know, teasing a prophet leads to know good – viz the children who mocked Elijah and were eaten by bears. But what of teasing on the highest level.

In the book, the prophet, after the famous big fish incident, rails against Nineveh, calling upon the city to repent to escape the wrath of God. We know how this has gone – from Sodom to Jerusalem. But in a rare exception, the Nineveh-ians do repent. They put on sackcloth and ashes. And because God is merciful and kind, he doesn’t bring down the fire this time.

This, it turns out, doesn’t satisfy the prophet. He accuses the good Lord of being a softy – too good and kind. And he asks God to take his life. He seems to feel ashamed that Nineveh was not destroyed.

“Then, said the Lord, doest thou well to be angry?” Or in the more recent versions, is it right for you to be angry? [wayyihar]. As this is the good Lord, commentators usually view this phrase as a reproach. But the tone of this reproach is, I’d maintain, a teasing one. What the Lord is getting at, like a good psychoanalyst, is the prophet’s little secret: the prophet tends to grow all too fond of his anger. Indignation and outrage are not free from the usual circuits of the libido – they become deeply satisfying automatisms. Any old codger – me for instance – can tell you that.

The essayist-prophet is a type in all Western European literatures. English has Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, to name a few – even Woolf, in her last essay, Three Guineas, tested her own prophetic instrument. I'd put, for good measure, John Berger in this group. The French have Pascal, Peguy, Bloy, and to an extent Sartre. The Germans Marx, Nietzsche, and Karl Kraus. Etc., etc.

And it is always a question with the prophet: if the word repented along the lines they have laid out, could they be satisfied? Which is why, so often, the prophet guards the anger through a nostalgia that speaks of absolute turns in history – we will never get back this innocence. Denunciation banks on the irrevocable.

Of course, Jonah’s anger does not negate Jonah’s prophecy, but it does hint at a different kind of prophetic attitude, one that turns inward, that gets behind the assertion to the doubt, and from the doubt, outward, softens the denunciation.

Commodification on the streets of Paris

 

“As I went out one morning”to quote a song, I strolled around the Marais until I came upon the Camper shoe store and “laboratory” on Rue Debelleyme, and I started to laugh.

The laugh has to be backfielded. Go back to Paris this Spring. There were constant demonstrations against our squirt of a president, and this was accompanied by much black block versus the cops action. One of the black bloc signatures was to throw bricks through the windows of luxury goods shops and banks. I once saw a Gucci store that not only put the usual plywood over the window, but actually took down the Gucci sign, trying to hide. The result of this anti-capitalist fronde was that for a while, many streets in Paris sported shops with broken store windows.

Now, Paris is the home of the art of the show window. Beginning with the consumer society of the 19^th century, this has been one of the constants, something the walker in the city looks out for. Show window design is an almost pure interface between art and commerce – it is the epitome of what Marx called Kommodifitzierung, commodification – the turning of an object or event into a marketing ploy. Interestingly, if you look back on the translation of this word into English, it really didn’t gain ground until the early 80s, when “commodification” began to show up in works of art and literary theory, and hence to newspapers. The NYT has always been my paper of record for the popularization of words and phrases – they crop up there, when they are new and dripping with yolk, captured by quote marks. So it was with “commondification”. The quotes are a way of capturing but not claiming the word. Commodification with quote marks is somehow stronger than commodification without quote marks – it is a sort of meta-commodification.

Anyway, back to my laugh. Some show window artist must have thought about the stoned windows, with the result that the Camper “laboratory”, with its function of selling shoes, is now fronted by a window in which the spiderweb imprint of the fractured window has been painted on the windows. They are fake stoned windows! This is bold, this is ironic, this is commodification and ultra irony! The irony being, in part, that Camper shoes – which I wear, normally – are definitely not luxury goods. They are wanna be luxury goods. If you want luxury sneaks, go to Balanciaga.

Commodification as an aspirational claim is one that passed over my head. But after laughing about the window, I had to admire it. It has long been the proud aim of neoliberal culture to absorb all lefty-ness in the quest to sell more goods, but usually there is some time lag and some pretence. I do not know how long it took, after Che’s death, for Che’s t shirt to arise as an accountrement for the college student, but I imagine it wasn’t an immediate process. But Campers has shown how to do it in real time.

Chapeau!

creatures of the simulcast

 

 

Andy Kaufman did a funny stand-up routine back when he was funny and, even, alive. He would come out and stand, shifting from one leg to another, his eyes bright and idiotic, and in that funny unplaceable high pitched foreign accent he would tell the audience that he was going to do some imitations, as comics do. Then he says: this is my aunt X, and proceeds to do an imitation of a figure from his, or at least his persona’s, household.

The humor here, like most of Kaufman’s schtick, is all about pranking the routine of the prank – about stripping away the comic staple and making comedy of it. Here, of course, the expectation that is disappointed into laughter is that the imitation will be of a celebrity. That the aunt is not a celebrity sort of misplaces and transduces the motif. It is a de-vaudeville vaudeville act.

The imitation is parasitic on celebrity culture, which is a good entrance into celebrity culture and our “episodic, anonymous relations” with celebritries – to quote “celebrity studies” scholar Chris Rojek. The fame of the celebrity is defined by some quantitative threshold of episodic, anonymous recognitions. It is possible that Kaufman’s aunt – or Kaufman’s character’s aunt – is recognized by everyone in the family and on the street,  but she is not recognized to the point that a random audience can recognize her.

Celebrity, to this extent, and money share similar structures, and it is hard to imagine, so firmly are they built into modernity through the quotidian, what life would be like outside of them.

Just as the vast majority of people have never studied the way the Treasury issues money on the promise that the face value is a value, so, too, the vast majority have never met in any meaningful way the celebrities that we all talk about and read about all the time. Perhaps you become an economist if you feel compelled to understand how the issuing of money could possibly work. If you are compelled to actually meet the celebrities you “know”, you are more likely to become a stalker.

Mostly, we settle for having a feeling we know what this or that celebrity is like “in real life”. This is a clue, I think, about modern life. As Georg Simmel pointed out – again and again and again – in The Philosophy of Money, money, in its historical development, tends to a more and more quantitative existence, to become a self-claimed marker of value. This is what Simmel meant by abstraction as a social process. Similarly, although celebrity seems utterly sunk in the particular – the particular of Elvis, of Queen Elizabeth, of Prince – the aura of celebrity is an abstraction of the always deferred meeting – the confirmation of what they are “like.” Celebrity without fame, as in the case of Kaufman’s aunt, is possible only in a small world format, where the abstraction of meeting becomes many degrees less – actual meeting becomes many more degrees possible. To be a famous poet, for instance, given the small world of poets, means that others in that world are likely to run into you.

These abstract relations to real people are, once we think about them, a little uncanny. It is as though we were dealing with ghosts, or demons, or gods. How much of our existence should we devote to these people?

There is, too, a temporal aspect. The three celebrities I named are all dead. Yet I’d contend that they still exist in our simultaneity – they exist as they have always existed, as images.

The important thing, within the societies that within the temporal dimension of simultaneity,  is that the public and these publics form out of the same principle – the subordination of haptic space to another kind and degree of proximity, which is mediated by this social mode of temporality. The French 19^th century sociologist Tarde mentions this in connection with the news. News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, an important movement is captured. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity.”  He does not, unfortunately, disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”. But ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. It is in this sense that we are not simply conscious of being simultaneous with, but as well, and more strongly, that the simultaneous is moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front. Tarde picked up on that movement as a crowd phenomenon.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under that baptism and curse. But Fabian’s concern for cultures exogenous to Europe blinded him to the effect of modernity within Europe, and America, where we witness another allochronic effect having to do with the new. Simultaneity is the horizon for a temporal competition – one in which the new, the young, the latest compete against the old, the laggard, the out of touch.

This is how celebrity, far from being some trivial, aleatory thing, is really a symptom of what modernity is all about.  Celebrity contains our multitudes.

Hypochondriaque lecteur - mon semblable

 

The temperature of the Golden Mean is 98.6 F.

Or is it 97.5F?  Surveys differ. The point, however, is that the warmth of my body and the warmth of your body, when healthy, dips lower or higher only by a decimal point or so. Our warmths are a community, and even a bond between us. I don’t have to touch you to know this.

“You are going to make yourself sick.” This is a common enough parental warning. My Grandfather used to worry about wearing a sweater or coat inside, because, according to his calculations – or some advice handed down from some shadowy figure in his background, back in the 1910s – the protection against the cold aided by these vestments was nullified if they were worn in the heated inside environment. I still half believe this is true, though I have never googled it for a fact. To make yourself sick is an interesting, and multiply implicating phrase – it is perhaps our entrance into neurosis.

Sickness, we like to think, is exterior – it is the invading germ, or some dire environmental circumstance. The self, a captain as helpless as the tied down Ulysses, passing by the sirens, can’t, in one view,  of itself make the body sick. Long before Freud, however, this was a disputed issue. In his introduction to his book on various hypochondriacs, Brian Dillon writes:

The history of hypochondria – the history, that is, of what was meant by the word and what we mean by it today – is the history, then, of a “real” disease which has lost most of its symptoms over the course of several centuries, and also of a prodigious variety of imaginary disease that has come to be recognized once more, in our century, as a pathology in itself, a disorder with identifiable symptoms and some possible cures. The chronology is confusing, the vocabulary ambiguous and palimpsestic, the illness at times as chimerical as the horrors imagined by its victims. But the stakes are clear: to think about hypochondria is to think about the nature of sickness in a fundamental sense, to ask what can legitimately be called a disease and what cannot….”

Dillon’s nine portraits of hypchondriacs are mainly English or America – Marcel Proust and Daniel Paul Schreber being the exceptions – and that makes some sense. George Cheyne, the late seventeenth century physician most famous for advocating vegetarianism, wrote a book entitled the English Malady:  or a treatise of Nervous diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, etc. The French associated Spleen with the English character until the twentieth century – Jules Verne’s Phileus Fogg is of the type, a wager away from boredom. Boredom: another typical English malady. The idea was, vaguely, that given a foggy climate and the diet of the wealthy English bourgeoisie, tending to fats and alcohol, hypochondria was a result consistent with what the physician would consider natural history:  

“What we call Nervous Distempers, were certainly, in some small Degree, known and observ'd by the Greek , Roman , and Arabian Physicians, tho' not such a Number of them as now, nor with so high Symptoms, so as to be so particularly taken Notice of, except those call'd Hysterick , which seem to have been known in Greece , from whence they have deriv'd their Name…”

If, as I believe, hypochondria amplifies the sense of some irreducible but misplaced exteriority where the interior, the self is supposed to be, then it makes sense that the novelist and the hypochondriac were bound to meet. It is at the hypersensitive DMZ that we expect to find our great modern novels. This is why The Magic Mountain is such an experience for its faithful readers. Here, the thermometer looms large – one imagines it as a sort of thermometer maypole around which the characters, all with abnormal temperatures, dance. Can you even read the Magic Mountain, really read it, without feeling a bit ‘infected’?

The great readers are all people who, given the time, place and volume, are willing to invert their parents’ warning:  do make yourself sick.  Convalescence is our form of meditation.

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

The merveille comes gloved and heavy

Over the bone cobbled streets

To reckonings and money

And spots of blood on the sheets.

 

Full fathoms five in headlines drowned

We waken, drained – your mule vigor

Carmelized, ridden up and down

Unti we agree on its mortal rigor

 

That has left us speechless for another day.

What pound of flesh did you want

So much that this is the price you pay?

So to absence and this awful can’t.