Racism, atrocity and the eternal return of the same

 

I was raised by white parents in the suburbs in the South in the 60s, when apartheid was beginning to crack. These facts in the background – both the apartheid that made enormous room for white people like my folks in the post-war years and the crumbling of apartheid that allowed Northern businesses to move into the south as it became a more normal part of the country – benefited me. What does it mean then if, as in that moment that Nietzsche scripted in The Gay Science, I “affirm” myself within the universe of eternal returns? It means that I am confronted with the problem of what to do about the injustices, the atrocities, in which I am existentially implicated. I, an old white guy, cannot pretend that I am not part of the universal jelly – my tongue, my way of looking, my taste, my money, my food, all of it is unsegregated, cultural and economic appropriation out my bungus.

My strategy is one of critical affirmation, if that makes any sense. This is not just an individual problem, it is a social problem. A just social order has to be one that has a view of its past, or it will not be a social order at all.

So do I opt for self-condemnation? Do I apologize for Jim Crow? Or do I go beyond these moments in the Eternal Return of R.G.?

This problem keeps coming out of the cracks and biting us. The neolib managers at the end of the neolib era are helpless as these past atrocities are either affirmed by the racist or scoured by the "woke".

In a sense, this is the kind of problem faced by Leibniz’s God. On the one hand, his perfection requires that he affirm himself perfectly, but on the other hand, the creation is full of atrocities, and the devil is abroad. To understand how to bridge this moral conundrum, Leibniz revamped the metaphysical discourse on possibility that had been built by the ancients and the medievals. He thought, in other word, that the greatest possible good was built into every appearance of evil, the paradigm case being, of course, the exercise of free will. In order to shake this out, so to speak, Leibnitz developed a cosmology of com-possibles, with the Good Lord operating as a divine sorting machine, extracting from each endless series of com-possibles the best possible world.

Such a God is a cold-eyed beast.

Voltaire of course saw that atrocity – war, slavery, cruelty on the most personal as well as on the highest social level – could not be overtaken or abolished by any possible future. Voltaire, who had been beaten by thugs hired by an aristocrat to teach him a lesson when he was young, always remembered those blows. Out of them, he built his own version of the Enlightenment. But he never thought that this justified the blows.

This enlightenment view comes close to claiming that atrocity and virtue could be radically separated. The problem with this view is that this radical separation turns regret into vindicativeness, thus increasing the likelihood of future atrocity.

This is from the first chapter of the Dhammapada:

“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,"—in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.

He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,"—in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.

For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.

The world does not know that we must all come to an end here;—but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once.”

Max Mueller’s translation is all too Christian, but I have always taken these verses seriously. The thought of past abuse and its transformation into a fucked up emotional docket that one enacts – this I have seen in my life. This, I think, everybody has seen. And yet here’s the thing: there is no suggestion here that we could do something beyond ceasing our own hatred. That we can turn on those who abuse, rob, defeat, and kill. Or even – the social conditions that make it an advantage to abuse, rob, defeat and kill.

In Voltaire’s satire at its most pointed, civilization becomes a generally systematized brutality, interspersed with a few minuets. This might well be how he saw Frederick the Great’s Germany – Voltaire had a catbird for that performance.

Yet the great atrocity in Candide is a non-human event: the Lisbon earthquake. This projection upon nature of the human, all too human source of pain is something that was spotlighted by Rousseau, who sensibly wrote that the lesson of the Lisbon earthquake isn’t a cosmic lesson about the evil of nature – which is Voltaire’s own Leibnitzianism - but a practical lesson about city planning.

This is what Voltaire wrote about the earthquake in a letter to a friend:

“This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath debris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.”

Voltaire went on to write a poem about the earthquake, which generated the response from Rousseau. It is rare that Rousseau gets to play the role of the calm reasoner, but in this case, he did. Rousseau’s letter to Voltaire takes him up on his cosmic despair and the comfortable lifestyle that allows it.

“Have patience, man," Pope and Leibnitz tell me, "your woes are a necessary effect of your nature and of the constitution of the universe. The eternal and beneficent Being who governs the universe wished to protect you. Of all the possible plans, he chose that combining the minimum evil and the maximum good. If it is necessary to say the same thing more bluntly, God has done no better for mankind because (He) can do no better."

Now what does your poem tell me? "Suffer forever unfortunate one. If a God created you, He is doubtlessly all powerful and could have prevented all your woes. Don't ever hope that your woes will end, because you would never know why you exist, if it is not to suffer and die...."

I do not see how one can search for the source of moral evil anywhere but in man.... Moreover ... the majority of our physical misfortunes are also our work. Without leaving your Lisbon subject, concede, for example, that it was hardly nature that there brought together twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock. But many obstinately remained . . . to expose themselves to additional earth tremors because what they would have had to leave behind was worth more than what they could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster through the desire to fetch their clothing, papers, or money? . .”

I’m with Rousseau. In other words, the movement in Voltaire, between disbelieving that we could build a world in which we regret nothing to believing that we could only build, if we were fortunate, tiny nests in which regret was held at bay – is an altogether too unambitious Enlightenment.

History is a wash, but I got mine – that is no righteous attitude.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike

 
How many rainy days have I lived through in my life? I’d guesstimate more than 2 thousand. Not days of perpetual cloudburst, which are rare, but days of off and on drippiness, of drizzle and low clouds, of looking out the window and saying, “It’s raining again?”
All those days. Yet what do I know about rain?
Know, here, is an ambiguous word, reflecting both acquaintance, a poetics of familiarity, and logic, or the science of geography. From the point of view of the latter, rain is an effect of the complex atmospheric system, composed of one form of matter, and in no way organized by its own intelligence or life. The smallest microbe has the advantage of self-organization and reproductive capacity over the largest cyclone. But from the point of view of familiarity, this doesn’t seem right. From my acquaintance with rain, it seems, if not wilful, at least on the order of other non-domestic beasts and plants. It is above all the negative of shelter.
Bachelard, in the Poetics of Space, makes the good point that “every truly inhabited space comports the essence of the notion of the house (maison).” It is the old janus-faced house/home card. Rain seems to be, to a city dweller such as myself, something to get out of. And those who cannot get out of the rain – the homeless – are not just soaked – they are rain-cursed. The heat of summer is, perhaps, more fatal to the homeless, especially now, as summers grow exponentially more threatening. But in older people – such as myself – who adapted to a weather system that we have drunkenly tossed in the garbage can, the rain, soaking you, is a truer measure of misery.
This is rain as a dark art. But within the house, with the rain coming down outside the window, the rain is also a blessing. It has often been noticed that the God of the Pentateuch is not only the God who spoke from the fire to Moses, but the God whose power to bring rain is of the essence to the community. In Deuteronomy, the contrast is made between the fertile Nile, where the water is, as it were, from the very landscape, and the promised land, where the water is a matter of precipitation. We think of the ancient civilizations as riverine, oriented to rivers, taking their water from rivers, but there are other communities where the rain takes the place of the river.
In Paris, of course, the river has long become more décor than godhead – although the occasional floods disabuse us of the notion that the river is “tamed”. But it is the rain that makes us think of water as something wild. Wild in the city sense, like pigeons, not wild like predators in the jungle. I watch the rain and smile: the city needs refreshing. Or I watch the rains in November, which in conjunction with the time change makes everything dark early, and I have a seasonal down.
Still, I rarely feel the rain. My most dramatic rain experience was in Austin, Texas. It was the year I dropped out of grad school and everything seemed to go wrong – one of those years. They come to even the most bourgeois among us. Anyway, for reasons I don’t remember, I had to go to Northern Austin, which back then was where the city petered out into wastelands and car parks. The clouds burst as I was walking along – I think I was lost, at least that is how it is in my memory – and I got utterly drenched. All the petty miseries of my life were in that drenching. I was a mini-Ahab walking along a highway over which cars were speeding and splashing. I received my fair share of splashing as well.
Here, rain was not a blessing but an injustice. The unfairness of life – which is basically being without a home/house – was a palpable, wet thing.
That memory has dimmed, but not vanished – and I think of it this November, as tents go up on the banks of the Seine, where the homeless are encamped, or on the square of the Hotel de Ville, or in the alleys near the Republique. The homeless seem much more present now – and from what I read, this is especially true of the States – than they were five years ago, in the pre-Covid days.
Rain should be a blessing. That’s my politics.
 

The spectre and the soul: from Derrida to Netflix

 When Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx in the 90s, triumphalist neoliberalism, succeeding the collapse of Communism in the West, was ready to treat Marx and Marxism as an intellectual frolic, of no more importance, now, than Madame Blavatsky. Derrida, to his eternal credit, rediscovered the Gothic vocabulary within which Marx’s rhetoric was immersed, and took the spectre and haunting as ways of mediating a sense that we had somehow missed, as a culture, the alternative future we had worked for and expected. We, so to speak, stood the better angels of our nature up against the wall, executed them, and had the servants drag them away and bury them.

In an essay on the “spectral turn” and “hauntology” (that o so 00s term of art), Kit Bauserman, at the Journal of the History of Ideas site, surveys the way ghosts and spirits have returned in the humanities as “pure metaphors” or social phenomena. The idea that Derrida uses the ghost of the spectre as a “pure metaphor” is at the heart of the essay – and I think it is wronghearted, since it is not at all clear what is meant by the phrase. What is the spectre a metaphor for?

In Bauserman’s essay, the philosophical and literary initiates into the spectral turn are urged to look at anthropology and ethnography, a very good suggestion. However, as is so often the case in disquisitions about hauntology, one word seems exorcized: the word “soul”.

Personally, I think part of what has happened, has been happening for a long time to that Palefaced mook, Western Man, is a de-souling. The soul is no longer serious business. Hauntology, ghosts, horror, the gothic – all of this is dandy, we can study this. But there is no study of the soul and what happened to it.

The soul was a part of the descriptive picture of human life in the cosmos not just for philosophers and preachers and poets, but for every peasant and city slicker. The soul might or might not require the body, it might or might not survive death – hibernating, up in Heaven, down in hell – but it was an invisible but palpable part, or center, of the material self.

Horror, which seems to be the key genre in movies and tv at the moment, keeps the soul around for grins, but has really substituted for it a kind of manic violence, the cosmological coordinate of the dwindling human kindness we all expect from the post-apocalypse.

The soul and its vocabulary has long been a matter of bad taste and sentimentality. Soul speak – usually this is the prelude to some awful downloading of phobias – racial, sexual, classicist, etc. How the soul ended up like this should be, well, entertained by hauntological studies.

The devaluation of the soul is definitely an ongoing event in intellectual culture. It has left a hole. In Baverman’s essay, it is, in this way, like the spectre:

Spectrality studies’ history makes clear how the use of ghosts as a metaphor became widespread. The Spectralities Reader, a spectral studies anthology edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, chronicles the field’s development. It likely received its name from Bernard Steigler’s 1993 interview with fellow philosopher Derrida, titled “Spectrographies.” The interview, included in Ecographies of Television, clarifies the difference between the “ghost” and the “specter.” The “ghost” is a revenant, a past that keeps returning to the present reality. It is undead. The “specter” is somewhat different. It is of the “invisible visible.” It is much like a missing puzzle piece, its conspicuous absence defining its presence.”

I would distinguish, though, between the conspicuous absence of the spectre and my argument about the soul – its absence is inconspicuous. The soul’s abdication is, to my mind, a much bigger deal than the death of God – or perhaps I should say, they are both similar systems for a world historical loneliness. This is why the horror genre is located on one of the great fault lines of our contemporaneity – it recognizes these symptoms.

The marriage crisis game

 

A funny thing happened on the way to the marriage crisis.

In the Reagan years, as Susan Faludi explains in her book, Backlash, a study that seemed to show that college educated women faced a “marriage crunch” in the “marriage market” got saturation coverage in the press, which was well satisfied with the idea that  feminism ruined everything.

The numbers were bogus – it turned out that the study that showed the marriage crunch used doubtful assumptions and was disputed by numerous other studies – but it turned out that this didn’t matter. The rightwing phobic reaction to feminism attached itself to the study symptomatically, the way a panicked child might clutch a teddy bear, and it was not about to have its symbol taken from it.

Periodically, since, the right has stirred up marriage crises, on the principle that you can never gull the folks too much, enunciated by the immortal words of the Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, whose signs advertising “The Royal Nonsuch” contained the sentence: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED. “If that don’t draw em,” the Duke said, “I don’t know Arkansaw.”

Arkansaw has become national since Mark Twain’s time, and it is populated mainly by men who, between bemoaning the fact that the guv’mint only favors blacks and that elections are frauds, also throw in a bit about ugly feminist women. Arkansaw is like that.

However, the message about the “marriage market” – a phrase that wreaks of the University of Chicago economics department – has, funnily enough, begun to fall on deaf ears. The distaff side – all those women out there – have had enough.

One feels the desperation creeping into the Royal Nonesuch. The American Enterprise Institute, that beacon of University of Chicago thinking, has been sponsoring something called the National Marriage Project. One of its members, a UVA prof named Brad Wilcox, has written a book whose very title is a Fox News anxiety dream: GET MARRIED: Why Americans must defy the elites and tax the wealthy at a ninety percent rate… oops, got that title wrong. Here it is: “why Americans must defy the elites, forge strong families, and save civilization.” The AEI, as is well known, loves them some civilization, the saving of which cannot, however, involve peace, saving the earth from climate change catastrophe, or taxing the wealthiest.

But how bout that marriage, ladies?

I was pleased to see that this book, which comes out, heh heh on Valentine’s Day, received a pre-emptive first strike by Anna Louie Sussman on the NYT opinion page: She points out some simple things. For instance, the absolutely rotten state of Arkansaw, i.e. American malehood.

“But harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today. Having written about gender, dating, and reproduction for years, I’m struck by how blithely these admonitions to get married skate over people’s lived experience. A more granular look at what the reality of dating looks and feels like for straight women can go a long way toward explaining why marriage rates are lower than policy scholars would prefer.”

 

She does not go into the reasons for this, but I would venture a few – all of which are tied to the Neoliberal culture.

Let’s pick one: the decline and the abasement, from the poohbahs on high, of culture and the humanities.

The very terms that the Chicago school employs – the marketization of everything – is a part of this culture. The market model seems more engineering like, more scientific. It isn’t. It is a pretty lousy model for marriage in the age of the love marriage – a model that grew up in the developed countries and became dominant for most people in the 19^th century. Without dowries, without the patriarchal household, marriage becomes something very different. It becomes, I would say, a different story.

The story – romance, soap opera, tragedy, comedy – is at the heart of the love marriage. And stories and songs are just the kind of thing that the new Dukes and Dauphins find laughable. Educate your kids with stories and songs? Where is the hard science that’s gonna make them docile button pushers?

The narrative deficit in the U.S. is very gender-defined. Men don’t read. Men have an amazing paucity of critical capacity to analyze language or larger narrative patterns. Men tend to think that there is some fatal, ontological divide between the intellect and feeling. Etc., etc.

Of course, this is not true of all men.  But it is true that the right has long defined itself in terms of its attack on the humanities and all that has developed under its aegis. In a sense, the right does have a good sense of its enemies. Although teaching the college kids to deconstruct Twelfth Night does not seem like it would threaten the larger structures of capitalism or patriarchy, historically, one of the important feeders into the civil rights movement for women in the seventies was, precisely, English departments at universities. In France, at the moment, post-colonial studies and gender studies are under attack by the usual suspects, because these threaten the premises of France’s neo-colonialist attitude to the South and, as well, promise to shake up the massive gender imbalances within French organizations.

Neoliberal culture is not just about University of Chicago economics. What makes it “neo” is that the culture tries to integrate the gains of the civil rights movement and the deregulated economy of global capitalism. This is an understudied part of the culture. At a certain point, the contradictions between these movements and the thrust of capitalism surface. They surface on the left and the right. On the right, we can see this surfacing in the use of “elites”. These elites are not defined by Capital – they are defined by the attempt, however weak, to continue the gains of the civil rights movement.

Sussman’s piece doesn’t go here, but it could. Sussman quotes the AEI’s Brian Cox in part of the article:

Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added. He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully. Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”

What is this “doing”? It is imagining. It is narrating. It is the old, old business of singing songs and telling stories. Which, after finding food, drink and shelter is one of our oldest needs. Maslow’s ladder needs a redo. What happens when you strip the dignity from singing songs and telling stories?

Well, we are living in an experiment to find out.

Mere anecdotes, the historian said, and ordered another port

 

Of Borges’ 1935 book, The Universal History of Infamy, the best things are: a, the title, and b., the preface, a glorious meditation on the baroque which has had many repercussions in Latin American lit and historiography.

The stories themselves, though, are a bit thin.

Still, it is a title to dream about. Infamy has filled our eyes and ears so often, since it was written, that we are all becoming a bit nearsighted and deaf. In a sense, these fictions – inspired, I think, by a French tradition going from Nerval to Marcel Schwab, of which the English equivalent is Pater’s Imaginary portraits – have also inspired, or at least communicated secretly (secret communications are the plumbing of culture, vases communicants indeed) with the vein of microhistory that revived the discipline in the 70s and 80s. One dreams of, say, a Universal history of survivors, a Universal history of double agents, etc. And yet, the universal here is pointillist – it is a matter of extending the anecdote.

Lionel Gossman wrote what I believe is one of the great essays on the anecdote, “Anecdote and History”, which appeared in the 2003 journal, History and Theory. After a preface, Gossman gets down to thesis business with a very deft hand:

“The relation of the epic and dramatic genres, and the implications, in terms of ideology or Weltanschauung, of narrative versus dramatic representation of the world, have been a major topic of reflection on literature since Antiquity. As  anecdotes, as I now believe, may favor either--they may reduce complex situations to simple, sharply defined dramatic structures, but they may also, if more rarely, prise closed dramatic structures open by perforating them with holes of novelistic contingency-a brief discussion of this topic is in order.”

Gossman references Barthes’s essay on faits divers, in which, Barthes claimed, disproportion becomes the rhetorical dynamic – which, if we want to extend our range of references, always a fun thing, we could bring back to Borges’ essay on the baroque.

Grossman uses the etymology of anecdote to show how the thing's semantic charge changed over time. Anekdoka was, apparently, the title of Procopius's Secret History. As it was translated into European languages, anecdote took on the meaning of unpublished, and the secondary meaning of secret history. Anybody who has read Procopius's history knows how salacious the book is: the vague reputation for tasty salacity became attached to anecdotes. Voltaire, according to Grossman, exhibited extreme contempt for the genre. In particular, the anecdote disturbed Voltaire's notion of what history -- the history of historians -- was all about. Although Grossman doesn't exactly show this outright, Voltaire's agenda, as a historian, was to rescue it from the collectioneering science of the antiquarians. For Voltaire, history's moral bound was defined by scale: history was an account of great events. Of course, Voltaire's perspectivism nuanced his idea of great events. Not every king or noble was great. The social hierarchy did not define greatness, but it did tone it.

In this way, Voltaire, far from being the grinning undertaker of the ancien regime, was its great and final ideologue. Grossman quotes an interesting review of Rousseau's Confessions that, while not penned by Voltaire, reflected the Voltairian vision:

 

Voltaire’s mostly negative judgment of anecdotes was also determined, however, by the same classical, fundamentally conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Annee Litteraire to condemn Rousseau’s Confessions as an act of literary arrogance and presumption. “Where would we be now,” they protested in 1782, “if every one arrogated to himself the right to write and print everything that concerns him personally and that he enjoys recalling?”

The genealogy of the phrase, “my truth”, which became a byword in the social media America of the 00s, goes back a long way

 

We don't believe that Voltaire's position can fairly be called conservative. But otherwise, this is a highly revealing sentence.

 According to Grossman, by the end of the eighteenth century the transition from secret history to symptomatic event was being slowly achieved -- felt, in fact, in the etymological sinews of the language. Grossman concentrates on some important figures, and quotes a marvelous anecdote of Chamfort's:

 

"As early as the last third of the eighteenth century some of Chamfort’s anecdotes appear to have had such symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance - who,being drunk one night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted with the fact by the horrified innkeeper, calmly replied: “Add it to the bill” - seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifference of the rich and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomatic of the personage described, the Duke of Hamilton, and, beyond him perhaps, of the social relations of a particular historical moment, that of the ancien regime."

Anecdotes, if one has a genius for the selection and allegorization for them, as Chamfort did, become symptoms – of a larger whole, a diseased culture or historical tranche. The problem lies in that particular genius, which is nourished by a culture that still treasures conversation and the heroism of wit. Those who have no wit – the heathen raging outside the cenacle, or the entirety of the Silicon Valley brotherhood, and their partners, the CEOS presiding over universities – fear and despise it.

I'm thinking about anecdote and Cold War history as I've been delving into newspapers and journalist historians to create my own Universal History of Infamy, subsection the long Cold War.

The curious monster Albert Speer

 

Among the more curious phenomena of the Cold War liberal era, nothing is curioser than the elevation of Albert Speer. I was looking through the archive of the NYRB and came upon a review of one of Speer’s minor screeds by Norman Stone in 1982 that was mindboggling in its, shall we say, charity. Of course, the Paperclip current in the Western alliance always p.r.-ed the Nazis that it appropriated. Werner Von Braun went from the S.S. commander of one of the worst of the concentration camps, at Peenemuende, to a figure close to Walt Disney’s tickerbell – a magical fun figure who impressarioed our trip to the moon! But Albert Speer was actually tried at Nuremberg. Of course, he made an impression because he was not a gross, fat hog, but a neat, trim techno figure who said he was guilty – although as a codicil he added that he was guilty, but not of anything that he'd done. After he got out of prison, his autobiographies became best sellers on the NYT list. And he became a celebrity.

Anyway, to Norman Stone. Here’s the two grafs: “When Albert Speer died last September in London, his obituarists were, generally, kind. True, he had been Hitler’s friend, favorite architect, and arms minister. But after 1945 he had been consistently and dignifiedly repentant. He served his two decades’ imprisonment after Nuremberg with great fortitude. His memoirs of the Hitler era, Inside the Third Reich, and his Spandau Diaries, which recorded how he survived twenty years’ imprisonment, have achieved classic status. Speer was also very anxious to help journalists and historians. He was always being interviewed, often at great inconvenience to himself.

It was characteristic of him that he should have died in the course of one such venture. Although he was seventyfive, and not in good health, he agreed to travel from his country home in the Algäu to London for a television interview with the BBC. It was also characteristic, may it be said in passing, that he would not accept a fee for this. The money was to be paid to a charity which he supported—as he did with a considerable proportion of his royalties.”

He was a regular Florence Nightengale, save for running a slave empire that starved, beat, and tortured hundreds of thousands of people to death. In a post-Cold War piece about Speer in NYRB in a review for 2015 by Martin Filler we get a crucial bit of information about Speer’s last trip to England that puts perhaps a different light on the subject:

“A more kindly view of Speer’s accomplishments is unlikely ever to prevail after the publication of the British-Canadian historian Martin Kitchen’s brilliant and devastating new biography of this manipulative monster. With a mountain of new research gleaned from sources previously unavailable, overlooked, or disregarded, Kitchen lays out a case so airtight that one marvels anew how Speer survived the Nuremberg trials with his neck intact, given that ten of his codefendants were hanged for their misdeeds (some arguably on a smaller scale than his own).

Instead, in the Spandau fortress he gardened for up to six hours a day and inveigled employees to smuggle in rare Bordeaux, foie gras, and caviar, and smuggle out manuscripts and directives to his best friend and business manager. In 1966 he exited a rich man, his war-profiteering fortune amazingly intact. As an international celebrity author he further cashed in on his notoriety during the remaining fifteen years of freedom he highly enjoyed. This Faustian figure died of a stroke at seventy-six in London, where he had gone for a BBC–TV interview, after a midday rendezvous at his hotel with a beautiful young woman.”

Surely, though, the beautiful young woman was a charity case!

I find the 1982 date for the Norman Stone review telling and sad. It was the beginning of  Reagan/Thatcherophonia, and all was as it should be in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and other countries where a Speer like fascism, with hints of anti-semitism but nothing gross, were in the air. In many ways, the Cold Warriors picked and chose their lessons from the 1933-1938 era of Hitler’s rule. The cleaning out of the commies. The infusion of money to the military. The getting rid of degeneracy. What’s not to like? Speer was their guy, a man who would understand the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian – a much vaunted difference in the Reagan era, floated by Jean Kirkpatrick and her buddies to general hurrahs.

When Norman Stone died, his obituary in the Herald of Scotland began:

“PROFESSOR Norman Stone, who has died aged 78, was an historian of conservative instincts and unconventional temperament who courted wider notice, and occasional notoriety, as a newspaper columnist and advisor to Margaret Thatcher.”

Color me unsurprised.

II've always thought Joachim Fest sorta let the cat out of the bag in the Cold War assessment of the Nazis. In the preface to his biography of Hitler: “If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination or an accident at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest of German statesmen, the consummator of German history." The right wing sweet spot was the pre-1938 Hitler - who resembles Pinochet or Rhee or any number of anti-communist strongmen. Fest's biography was published in the very year Pinochet seized power, 1973. Ah, coincidences.

On The Wasteland: a biography of a poem by Matthew Hollis

 

I walked into the Blackwood bookstore in Cambridge with A. and Adam. Adam was looking for a copy of Killers of the Flower Moon – at age eleven, he has decided to expand his cinephilia by reading the books that provide sources for movies he has seen. Hence, Adam trudging around with a biography of Oppenheimer that weighs as much as he does.

I was pleased to see, in the stacks on the table of recommended books, Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: a biography of a poem. I’ve been reading it in a spirit somewhat like Adam reading Killers of the Flower Moon – this is a book about the source of one of the great delights of my life. Eliot’s poems ran into me when I was in high school, and I even memorized them, or at least some of them. The Waste Land is a poem and a banner – at Oxford in the Twenties, I’ve read, the crowd Evelyn Waugh ran with would recite the poem through a loudspeaker as they drove in some car through the town – such pranks! I would recite bits of it to my tennis playing buds in high school. They didn’t mind – my role in high school was to be an intellectual poseur. The problem was that it was distracting to hear tags from the Waste Land when you were trying to close up to the net.

“I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

That sounded so satisfactory echoing among the tennis courts behind the main building of Dekalb Junior College. The College bears another name now, and who knows if the courts are still there. Ashes to ashes – such is my nostalgia for adolescence.

Hollis is very cool and confident about the sometime unprepossessing Tom and Viv act. Eliot, in this period, had still a ways to go before he decided to put a perpetual stick up his butt and call it religion or Christian civilization or whatever. How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot indeed. Half the book is about placing Eliot in that year in which he wrote the poem – and then, in writing the poem, Hollis does not overlook what a community effort it was, from Vivien’s suggestions to Pound’s. Pound’s were made just as Ezra himself was getting alarmed by Eliot’s increasingly moralizing criticism – the kind of criticism that latter claimed, for instance, that the important thing about Baudelaire was that he was Christian.

Hollis summarizes Pound’s response to the moralizing:

“He attributed to Eliot a remark that ‘the greatest poets have been concerned with moral values’, but that wasn’t exactly what had been said: Eliot had written of poetry, not poets, and of morality, not moral values. Nevertheless, Eliot’s article had prised open a discursive door that Pound would kick wide. ‘This red-herring is justifiable on the grounds of extreme mental or physical exhaustion,’ he announced in the Little Review, but justifiable on no other.5 The greatest poets have equally been concerned with eating breakfast and taking a walk and … Eliot’s statement, in other words, described nothing of significance.”

That’s rather my feeling, too. Poetry is pleasure, not a course of mineral salts. It is pleasure even in pain – that oddest of human feelings.

 

 

The credulous Mr. Locke - Shaftesbury and underground philosophy

Anthony, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1670-1713) was born into a title that had been given to his grandfather, the first earl, who was the giant of the family. The First Earl was one of the grandees who designed the proto-whig culture that opposed James II, and brought about his downfall. He was the patron of John Locke, whom he first employed as a physician, then encouraged as a patron, used as a pamphleteer, made the entremetteur for his son, Anthony, the second earl (who married the woman Locke found for him) and finally employed to tutor his grandchildren. By chance (although it is a chance that one is not surprised at in class bound Britain) two of the English philosophers, Shaftesbury and Mill, could claim to be entirely educated by the reigning English philosopher that preceded them – respectively, Locke and Bentham.

 

The third earl Shaftesbury dutifully followed in his grandfather’s footsteps – his father seems to have been an entirely ineffectual man – in promoting the Whig policy, first under William, then under Anne. On becoming the head of the house after his father’s death, he took over the running of the family estate, too. All of these burdens destroyed his health. He begins a typical letter to the manager of his estate, John Wheelock, in November 1703, like this:

 

“I am sorry to hear all things are so low and tenants so disheartened. The greater must be my frugality and care to repair the great wounds I have made in my estate. I shall keep in my compass of ₤ 200 for the year that I stay here [in Holland], and if this does not do it shall be yet less, and the time longer, for I will never return to be as I was of late richly poor; that is to say, to live with the part of a rich man, a family and house such as I have, and yet in debt and unable to do any charity or bestow money in any degree.” In another letter that same year, he writes:

 

“I should have been glad to have lived in the way that is called hospitable in my country, but experience has but too well shown me that I cannot do it. Nor will I ever live again as I have done and spend to the full of my estate in house and a table. I must have werhewithal to do good out of my estate, as well as feed a family, maintain a set of idle servants entailed upon me, and a great mass of building yet more expensive. If my estate cannot, besides my house and rank, yield me five or six hundred pounds a year to do good with (as that rank requires), my house and rank may both go together, come what will of them, or let the world say what they will, they shall both [be] to ruin for me...”

 

In the next decade, fighting a mysterious sickness and bouts of ‘melancholia”, Shaftesbury, like many indebted British nobles, economized by remaining for long seasons on the Continent. In his last journey to Italy in 1711, when he was deathly ill with shortness of breath – he’d been told, or believed at least, that the coal fires of London were to cause for his asthma, and was going to stay in Naples to breath the air there, and because it was cheap – he writes to Wheelock:

 

 

“As good a husband as I have been (and my wife surely the best housewife as well as wife, nurse and friend that ever was known in her whole sex), I have not been able to keep with the expense proposed, but have expended at least a hundred pund a month by Bryan’s reckoning, I fear I shall be little able to diminish it. But it will not be, I trust in God (and can surely presume), much beyond this present compass. If I live my family and paternal estate will not (I hope) be prejudiced by this remittance out of it for my subsistence...”

 

It was while in Naples that he completed the book that made him famous: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.

 

I have been reading one essay from that mass: ‘Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of wit and humor’. Shaftesbury’s reputation rather waned in the twentieth century, until Gadamer mentioned this essay in Truth and Method, since, of course, Gadamer’s book is concerned, in part, with the analysis of common sense. Both Gadamer and Habermas instigated an interest in the formation of the public sphere in the Enlightenment that has produced ever swelling torrent of books and articles, and Shaftesbury was revived, to an extent, as a spokesperson for sociability.

 

Myself, I’ve been struck by the discrepancy between this secondary literature and Shaftesbury’s writings. The secondary literature might persuade the reader to regard Shaftesbury as a sort of philosophical etiquette writer, decorous, a bore. But reading Sensus Communis and, especially, Shaftesbury’s notebook - which he entitled Askemata, or exercises, but which was published as the Philosophical Regimen – I’ve been struck, instead, by Shaftesbury’s near madness. His Philosophical Regimen, which has sunk into total obscurity, is a document that is as strange in its way as Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. John Stuart Mill fled to the Lake Poets for relief from his early teaching. Shaftesbury fled to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and yet one can still hear the voice of his tutor in the dense cloud of question marks and comments.

 

Let me end this with a quote from one of the letters about said tutor. This is to one of Shaftesbury’s admirers, Michael Ainsworth, June 3, 1709:

 

 

It was Mr. Locke that struck the home blow: for Mr Hobbes character and base slavish principles in government took off the poison of his philosophy. ‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order aand virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds. Innate is a word he poorly plays upon; the right word, though less used, is connatural. For what has birth of progress of the foetus out of the womb to do in this case? The question is not about the time the ideas entered, or the moment that one body came out of the other, but whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, at such or such a time, sooner of later (no matter when), the idea and sense of order, administration, and a God, will not infallibly, inevitably, necessarily spring up in him.

 

Then comes the credulous Mr. Locke, with his Indian, barbarian stories of wild nations, that have no such idea (travellers, learned authors! and men of truth! and great philosophers! have informed him), not considering that is but a negative upon a hearsay, and so circumstantiated that the faith of the Indian danger may be as well questioned as the veracity or judgment of the relater; who cannot be supposed to know sufficiently the mysteries and secrets of those barbarians: whose language they but imperfectly know; to whom we good Christians have by our little mercy given sufficient reason to conceal many secrets from us, as we know particularly in respect of simples and vegetables, of which, though, we got the Peruvian bark, and some other noble remedies, yet it is certain taht through the cruelty of the Spaniards, as they have owned themselves, many secrets in medicinal affairs have been suppressed.”

2.

Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis essay is, as he puts it, an earnest attempt to defend raillery. This is a very odd way to begin an essay on common sense, which is the kind of phrase that Shaftesbury’s tutor Locke was getting at with his notion that we receive our ideas from experience:

 

“But perhaps you may still be in the same humour of not believing me in earnest. You may continue to tell me, I affect to be paradoxical, in commending a Conversation as advantageous to Reason, which ended in such a total Uncertainty of what Reason had seemingly so well established.”

 

From the very beginning, then, Shaftesbury is presenting an explicit break between form and content. The form of the essay is, as Shaftesbury would know from Montaigne, the place of opinion, doxis, and is not a treatise. It deals with becoming – the characteristicks of men – rather than being – the universal forms. It is Shaftesbury’s piece of fun to defend mockery – his object – with a piece of reasoning. And that he labels this an essay on common sense calls attention to the difference between common sense and rationality. Shaftesbury is explicit enough about the nature of wit. It is paradoxical. It is extravagant. Moreover, it seems to affect a certain disconnect between the speaker and the opinion the speaker gives. In fact, at first glance, if we take common sense to be a secondary kind of rationality, it would seem that the freedom of wit and humor is a freedom from common sense in as much as common sense assigns beliefs to people, so that each self possesses a belief. On the other hand, it is a form of the commons, of shared possession. And there are many forms the commons takes – it isn’t all pasturing the village’s sheep. It is also the life of the common, in fairs, everyday talk, rituals. If we extend this sense of the common to common sense, then we are less shocked that wit, that thief who unlocks the chain binding a man to his opinion, should be part of the commons. On the other hand, as we know from Don Quixote, the impulse to unlock chains and free prisoners, while a noble one, can have dubious results.

 

Shaftesbury, puts the essay in terms of an argument with an unnamed friend who doesn’t see wit’s right to operate in the commons. Like the puritans casting out the punch and judy shows and the bear baitings, this friend can’t see the point of mockery, and can see, very well, the vice of it.

 

“I HAVE been considering (my Friend!) what your Fancy was, to express such a surprize as you did the other day, when I happen’d to speak to you in commendation of Raillery. Was it possible you shou’d suppose me so grave a Man, as to dislike all Conversation of[60] this kind? Or were you afraid I shou’d not stand the trial, if you put me to it, by making the experiment in my own Case?

 

I must confess, you had reason enough for your Caution; if you cou’d imagine me at the bottom so true a Zealot, as not to bear the least Raillery on my own Opinions. ’Tis the Case, I know, with many. Whatever they think grave or solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way: Tho what Another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise; and are forward to try the Edge of Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.

 

The Question is, Whether this be fair or no? and, Whether it be not just and reasonable, to make as free with our own Opinions, as with those of other People?”

3.

Of the major essays in my life, a number come from the pen of Carlo Ginzburg, a historian who has modelled himself on Auerbach – that is, a historian who seeks to understand narrative and its figural backgrounds, as they impose themselves in a history of the various instrumentalities of power. Or, to put it more crudely, how forms of inquisition fuck over the common life. One of Ginzburg’s essay, Making it strange: the prehistory of a literary device, has a pertinence here, in the case of Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury’s Philosophical Regimen brings to bear certain stoic techniques on his own particular madness. To understand those techniques,  Ginzburg is a good guide. He traces the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and, link by link, the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. Ginzburg does not mention Shaftesbury in his essay; yet his explanation of the Stoic method can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen.

“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or re erasure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:

 

“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”

Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”

Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....

“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)

While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:

“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”

 

Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theatre. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.

Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.

The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercise of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia

“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”

The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:

“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans and the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those that died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thy acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)

And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.

Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)

The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred.

Too little, in my opinion, has been made of Shaftesbury’s crazy book – one sees in it a link to Diderot’s Rameau’s nephew – not that Diderot read the Regimen, but that the spirits conjured by Shaftesbury from the Lockian ideology seem cousins to Diderot’s trickster – and from there to Hegel’s Phenomenology, which in a sense is also a crazy book. All of them registered in the philosophical underground that has merged so often with other undergrounds. It does so now, on social media, in plain sight.

The function of "then"

 "Then” is the shape of time, or at least of time for birds, beasts, and bacteria, and for all the other monuments of DNA as well. In the world of nuclear particles, ‘then’ is a wicket through which one can pass one way and then another and both simultaneously, or so the equations tell us.

“Then” is also, by a heavy coincidence, a logical function. Here it does not give us a temporal, but a seemingly atemporal sequence. Such is the magic of words, however, that we are always tempted to take the atemporal world of the variables of logic and confound it with the temporal world in which we find ourselves. We are always tempted to see logic in history, to see the temporal as the pattern of the temporal.
Yet is logic so blind to temporality? Do we require some second order of reasoning to reconcile the one to the other?
That is, perhaps, the task that falls to dialectic. It is a shady task – Kant for instance placed dialectic in the slum of philosophy, where the hucksters, grifters and sophists ply their wares.
Dialectic is not the royal road to truth, on this view, but is the path of pins – to borrow a trope from that most philosophic of tales, Little Red Riding Hood.
If we want to come to grips with substitution, the dark power of our time, we must begin with these imperfectly aligned domains. A certain kind of philosophy takes it for granted that the task is to align them perfectly. Another approach is to take their imperfect alignment as a great philosophical fact – perhaps the great philosophical fact, and draw the consequences. The consequences, according to this school, lay everywhere around us. Like the fallen body of the giant in Finnegan’s wake, the parts form our parts, and we can go endlessly through the semiosphere, from newspaper stories to the towering summas of culture, and continually feel this imperfect alignment, this intellectual scar.

My body, my unconscious

 

The old myth of the man who becomes another man or woman, who is translocated into some alien skin, muscle and sensory apparatus, is familiar to us all. My feeling is that I am that man – that this is an accurate account of growing up.

Try as I may, I can remember many things about my childhood, but not my stature, not what it felt like to be, say, four feet high. My carriage, my vehicle, was beyond me. I look at the world from my present height and can imagine no other way of looking at the world – yet I know I was not always like this.

This lack of a certain external visual sense of myself imposes itself on other bits of my quotidien. I look at myself in the mirror, I take selfies, but my self never seems completely wedded to my reflection, my selfie. In dreams, as they are reconstructed in movies, the dreamers see themselves: but this has never happened to me. I am, in dreams, deeply in myself. The camera never moves out, never moves around. Roger hiding in a closet while burglars are ransacking the house – a dream I have had a number of times – is always the self sealed in the closet, my sensory outlets taking in the scene as I normally do, and  never a picture of the self in the closet, a camera, as it were, rolling around and filming me.

In this sense, my mirror phase is always actually a hole phase. I still don’t entirely identify with the tenement. I wonder if movie stars, who have their image imposed upon them professionally, dream of their own faces?

 

Why read the classics? On Calvino's answer

Calvino begins his essay, Why read the Classics, by defining them in terms of a characteristic phrase: “I am re-reading x” The classics are haunted, as it were, by re-reading. We re-read in the classroom to answer questions (a site Calvino, I think mistakenly, throws out of consideration – an awful lot of reading is tied to the classroom, and it often seems that when we re-read on our own, the ghost of a classroom desk trails behind us, with its pencil groove and its slight, metallic smell – mixed in my case with the smell of a brown bag and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in wax paper ). We re-read outside of the classroom because, a, we are defensive about not having read,and want to make it known that we, too, have already read, and b, (the meat of Calvino’s theme), even when reading the first time, the classic imposes it scale on us, one that suggests an infinity of re-readings. When reading a classic, we cannot “escape” its design. In this sense, the classic is the opposite of escapist literature. We read that to get “lost”, by which we mean ‘lost’ from our everyday routines, our ordinary world, the one outside the book. It isn’t that we do not get lost in the classics – but it is a different kind of lost. It is all about disorientation and fate. Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, tells a story about getting lost in Rome, and finding that, over and over again, he has taken the wrong roads, which keep leading him back to a doubtful neighborhood. A neighborhood, we assume, that is a redlight district. Thus, in one sense, from the perspective of the super-ego Freud is lost, but, from another, more chthonic perspective, that of the libido, he is following the line of his fate.
This is the lostness experienced inside the classic. We are uncomfortably aware of some exterior intentionality that we have somehow swallowed – we are possessed.
Of course, the classics of high modernism show an acute awareness of the other kind of lostness. Leopold Bloom is a great admirer of Paul de Kock, a nineteenth century author of lubricious fare. And the lostness in the popular novel that is a rush – we read it all at once –is mimicked in prose that gushes with consciousness – in Ulysses, in To the Lighthouse, in Sound and the Fury, among others. And yet that enactment of being lost, carried away, is highly stylized – it is in fact just the kind of thing you don’t find in a popular novel. These moments are, as well, re-readable – in fact, if there are degrees in the infinity of re-reading in which the classic lives, they are even more re-readable than more conventional prose.
Oddly, Calvino misses a trick by confining the notion of re-reading to the classic text and not comparing it to oral ones – for there are stories that we tell about ourselves that we seem to tell over and over again. Years and years ago, I visited Monterray, Mexico, with a friend. I have found myself telling the story of that visit to dozens of people since. I’m not sure why that story has stuck with me so much, but as I tell the story, it becomes more and more devoid of living memory and more and more full of intentionality – of rhetorical memory, if you will. I have other stories like that as well. I think most people have a canon of stories they tell about themselves – their own classics. But in contrast to the re-telling that these stories seem to compel, there is a certain shyness about telling the same story twice. We are frankly embarrassed to be caught telling the same story twice. It is boring. Or it shows some fatal lack of memory – one should remember that X person has already heard the story.
And this gives us another clue to the nature of classics: they are eerily unembarrassed. They are not embarrassed about incest, about patricide and matricide, about dimemberment, and rape, about suicide – all the stories tumble out. They are even not embarrassed about boredom.
This is what sets the contemporary taste on edge about the classics. There is nothing more dismissive than the phrase, “that’s boring.” In a sense, the fear of boredom and the fear of age are connected in the ordinary norms of our everyday life. Youth sticks in the windpipe of the middle aged, they can’t cough it up or swallow it. And boredom is especially something to be fled. In both cases, the organic reality – that we age, and that there are large necessary patches of boredom in our lives if we actually do anything – are subject to a repression that expresses itself in the aesthetic sphere – a sphere that we tend both to diminish (it is only entertainment) and present in social situations to the exclusion of anything else. In the classics, boredom is intended. This seems utterly mad to those of us weaned on the entertainment industry’s quest to never, ever bore. Of course, that quest is itself mad – it dulls, and it excludes re-reading, which runs counter to surprise and sensation. The intentional boredom in the classic doesn’t entail that we will always re-read the boring patches and be bored – it does entail that the possibility not only exists, but is embraced. In the Library of Babel, there are an infinite number of boring texts, and texts that are even more boring, interpreting these boring texts. A classic that bored completely would not be re-read – but one that interested completely , that dispelled boredom, would not be re-read either, for it would have been trapped in its own successfully dealt with suspense, just as a good joke is trapped by its punchline. To repeat a good joke after telling it violates the rule of good jokes, and to re-read an entertainment violates the rule of entertainments. But the ideal entertainment is impossible - something within it will tend, however shyly, to the status of re-readability. Our favorite reads, even if they are Harlequin romances or porno fan fics, can not expel that classic instance.
x

The character puzzle

 

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

However, as she reflected on this curious situation (reflections she goes over in her article, Autobiography in Question. On Self Presentation and Life Description in an Indonesian Society) she noticed that other anthropologists also reported that first-person autobiographical accounts were difficult to get from informants all over the South Pacific, and in Africa. And she concludes, as other anthropologists were also concluding at the time, that there is something very “Western” about first person life stories. This is a large  conclusion pinned to a small reference: St. Augustine’s Confessions.

“I began to comprehend that I had fallen victim to my own cultural bias. Proceeding from Western cultural peculiarities I had assumed autobiographical narrating as known in the West to be a universal phenomenon. In contrast, the genre of autobiographical narrative seems to be strongly tied to a specific form of self-consciousness which is defined not only in terms of space, but also in terms of time. By taking Augustine's "Confessions" as a landmark in the development of this literary genre, the literary historian Gusdorf (1980: 33) correlates the evolution of the conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual - as a necessary precondition for autobiographical narration - with the tradition of self-examination in Christian ascetism. He defines (1980: 29) the genre of autobiography as "... a late phenomenon in Western culture, coming at the moment when the Christian contribution was grafted onto classical traditions. Moreover, it would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our own cultural area . . .."5

“Nevertheless, it may be stated that life history until the present has been conceived of by anthro- pologists and other social scientists as constituting a universal narrative genre.”

This reference is, I think, itself very Western – the uneasy mixture of this reference to a book that is, indeed, highlighted within some specific institutions in those parts of Europe that once constituted “Christendom” and, as well, to a tradition of ascetism that may have spread across the vast peasant masses who actually constituted that Christendom. It was certainly the case that, for centuries, the Church presented a vehicle for social mobility that was like no other in the rigidly hierarchized societies of the West. And that social mobility depended, in part, on learning how to talk about oneself – and others. How to self-represent.

The oral historian, Alessandro Portelli, wrote a book about oral histories that begins with an orally passed down “error” concerning the death of an industrial worker in a clash with the police. That worker, Luigi Trastulli, died in 1949 as a matter of hard fact, protesting against Italy joining NATO: yet in the stories passed down about him in Terni, where he lived, his death is placed, instead, in 1952, during a long and violent strike. The fact has its reasons – but so does error. Portelli quotes Benjamin’s sentence about Proust: For an experienced event is finite- at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is key to everything that happened before and after it."

I wonder whether if what Birgit Roettger-Roessler found among the Makassar was really that different from the difficulties with self-accounting among those people in the “West” – the vast majority, outside of the cities and castles, in the villages and farms – that form the city person’s image of the peasant. The idiocy of rural life is that “idios” is everywhere and nowhere.  When Portelli went to Terni with his tape recorder and started talking to people there, he found a situation not unlike that of the anthropologist in Sulawesi. The idea that the Other is Other to some European I too quickly passes over how composite, how edited, how rarified that European I is in Europe itself - and how Europeans, like the colonized Other, were subject to massive surveillance and pedagogical efforts to turn them into these “sovereign subjects”.

As without, so within – my golden rule.

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

Against the autobiographical I – the I that now is perpetually caffeinated and “excited” about job opportunities, or a new cosmetic, or yoga, or whatever, the Yankee I in its decay – there is the enduring social practice of the “character”.  It is interesting that character no longer carries any conceptual weight in an anthropological discourse that literally begins as a discourse about ethos, about character.

The standard reference in twentieth century writing on characters in literature is E.M. Forster’s division of characters into round and flat ones, elaborated in Aspects of the Novel (1927) with the same exemplary application of Cambridge method as that by which Ansell, in The Longest Journey, proves that there is a cow in the room. That is, distinctions are made, flare up in a burst of illumination, hold for an instant, are manipulated, and then retreat back to the dark. In the case of character, however, Forster is speaking in character as a novelist, and he wants to approach character as a technician: the point is that character enters narrative as a devise to be manipulated, worked on a grand scale and on a  miniature one, and is ultimately  in the hands of the reader, which is where the fun of the novel is. Readers, then, as well as novelists need a lesson in character, and this requires a lesson in distinguishing degrees, or types, of character.  Forster relates his flat characters explicitly related to the comedy of ‘humor’ in the 17th century, and he writes that they are “sometimes called types, sometimes called caricatures” – the calling here being done by the critics.  Round characters, on the other hand, have complexities that lie “under the surface”. Forster’s roundness is actually three dimensionality, and round characters have perspectival depth.

The distinction between flat and round is very much a pictorial reference, made explicit in the idea of “caricature”. In fact, in the early modern re-appearance of character, the Theophrastian ‘character’ and the Aristotelian “ethos”, which come down in two different lineages, could be and were figured under the metaphor of the sketch and the portrait. Both have different values. Both thematized character in different ways.

The neglect of character as a devise in both print culture and oral culture at the present moment, and the moralization or weaponization of “character” as a rightwing trope, is a puzzle that is all about our present moment.

Borges and the Total Library

 

One of Borges’ sweetest traits is his fidelity to the reading of his adolescence

       When a writer like Umberto Eco, who is a scholar of the highest level as well, references, say, Leibniz, one can take that reference for the visible mark left by Eco going through the master’s texts, G.I. Gerhardt’s edition of the Philosophische Schriften, pursued in Latin, French and German as far as need be. 

     When Borges, in the famous essay, The Total Library, refers to Leibniz, however, you know the reference was sifted through a book of popular science and philosophy: Dr. Theodor Wolff’s Der Wettlauf mit der Schildkröte. Gelöste und ungelöste Probleme – The race with the Tortoise. Wolff was a journalist, a writer on culture – although mostly at a journalistic distance. He is distantly of the same kind, although less systematic, as for instance Egon Friedell, or in the American context, Isaac Asimov, or the great Will and Ariel Durant. Another German writer, surely from Borges’s teen years, Kurd Lasswitz – a more Asimovian writer – is also mentioned, with some enthusiasm.

      Borges published the article in 1939, in an Argentina marked by anti-semitism and fascist-ophilia. There was a political undercurrent to the reference to Wolff.

      Theodor Wolff was a famous columnist in the German newspapers, and the editor of one of the great Berlin papers, the Tagblatt. He was also Jewish. Fleeing Germany after the Hitler takeover, he first went to Switzerland, where he was denied a visa, and then to France – which in the 30s did not put a lot of barriers up to the emigration of the German Jews, in contrast to the U.S. Unfortunately for us all, and fatally for Wolff, France fell to the Germans in 1940. Wolff during his period of exile was careful not to call attention to himself by criticizing the Third Reich. “With Eric Kaestner he was of the opinion that you could stop a snowball, but not an avalanche.” [From the Theodor Wolff website] The Italians arrested him in Nice in 1943 and handed him to the Gestapo. From whence he went to Drancy for transport to the camps, but was spared Auschwitz: he died in the Jewish hospital in Berlin: imagine the “care” in the Jewish hospital in Berlin.

      In 1939, Wolff, living in Nice and working on his memoirs, doubtless had no idea that an obscure Argentine writer was quoting him, and by quoting him, lifting him into the sphere of a different audience and a different posterity. Even though his posterity in Germany, after the war, was lined with articles and a biography, for here was a classical liberal assimilated Jew that the Adenauer era could point to with pride.

      I’ve tried to find Wolff’s text, but in that vast mass of texts – less library than maelstrom – offered by the Internet, this one text seems to be frustratingly absent. In Borges’ essay, as has been noted by Jonathan Basile in Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, Wolff’s work is in some ways mixed up with the essay-story, The Universal Library, by Kurd Lasswitz. A story in a dialogue, the kind of philosophical conte that Brges’s own work was akin to – Borges loved the story as an oral product that travelled from one person to another, as in the beginning of The Intruder:

 “People say (but this is unlikely) that the story was first told by Eduardo, the younger of the Nelsons, at the wake of his elder brother, Crisian, who died in his sleep sometime back in the nineties out in the district of Moron. The fact is that someone got it from someone else during the course of that drawn-out and now dim night, between one sip of mate and the next, and told it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I heard it. Years later, in Turdera, where the story took place, I heard it again.”

      This is perhaps a kind of paradox – in a story about the total library, which concerns, in maniac detail, print and alphabets, the story itself is first told, leaps into the world through the tongue and the teeth and pronunciation and the ear – a library of oral tales underneath the library of printed ones. A library, this second of the tales told, that is especially dear to a blind old man. A library that escapes the Total library. Although who can say, now that we record everything, if that evasive oral library is not being dragged in to our library-panoptican of the registered signal?