philosopher-villains

Klossowski, in the essay on the “philosopher-villain” that begins Sade, my neighbor, uses Sade’s own mocking division between the philosophers in his “own” works, who are decent people, and the philosophers in Justine, where, in an ‘inexcusable clumsiness that was bound to set the author at loggerheads with wise men and fools alike,” “all the philosophical characters in this novel are villains to the core.”

In a sense, what Sade is doing is employing the Russellian distinction between types, here – the philosopher-villains exist in quoted space. In one’s own work, where the citational melts away, the philosophers are decent – as decent as any lab worker who operates on the human product, as they used to say at the AEC when feeding selected American detritus – the poor, the non-white – bits of plutonium.

I remarked last time on Magris’ notion that transgression is embodied in the Nazi bureaucrat and the leader, which I think is a typical argument against Bataille’s notion of transgression. The argument that is mounted against Bataille ignores the opposition to power encoded in it, or claims that the opposition, being circumstantial, falls away from the generality claimed by the transgressor. Opposition is hypocrisy. Resistance is resentment. After all, if one supposes that all ideas and systems strive for power - and didn't Bataille claim not only to be a Nietzschian critic, but, in a sense, to be Nietzsche - than that opposition stands revealed as a hypocritical strategem, thrown away when the transgressor gains power and can do as he wants. Otherwise, it would seem, we are talking about organized futility – as we approach sovereignty, the institutional bonds all dissolve that give sovereignty meaning. Foucault, whose essay on the experience-limit touched that logic, began to backtrack in the seventies, for Magris like reasons – in fact, by becoming popular, transgression was actually lowering the real level of transgression in society.

I like Klossowski’s explanation of the Sadeian strategy, which is based on counter-generality. I like it because it goes so nicely with how the human limit was erased, on the theoretical level, by universal-making – making, for instance, universal history. Making universal emotions. Making universal subjects. Making a universal system of production in which universalized labor leads to infinite substitutability among the workers.

Sade, according to Klossowski, saw how he could game this enlightenment program:

“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…

With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible. These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity. Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty, is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality. Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 14-15]

Sade, then, is rejecting – or perhaps I should say, creating an antithesis - to one of the fundamental enlightenment discoveries – Bayle’s notion that the society of atheists would be every bit as moral as the society of believers. That is, Bayle took it to be a truth about human beings that belief and action are, in practice, forever divided. To believe we should love our neighbor as ourself, and to roust out our neighbor from her house and roast her, as a witch, on the nearest tarred pole, were not anthropologically contradictory things. To believe that the universe came together at random, and to denounce witch burning, were also not anthropologically contradictory things. By which I mean that Bayle did not come to this conclusion by going outward from a logical analysis of belief, but by suspending any analysis of belief and looking at what people said and did.

The image of the moral society of atheists was an immense shock in a culture that had sacralized belief. It runs through the enlightenment like pain ran through the princess after she’d spent the night sleeping on the pea. Tolerance, Mandeville’s cynicism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, they all come out of the methodological imperative of beginning first with what people did and said, and suspending belief. But, until one gets used to it, this is a highly unnatural stance to take. It seemed to eat away at any belief, since after all, what function did it have?

On the one hand, the space opened up by tolerance made possible the social notion of happiness – for it was intolerance of belief, more than anything else, that had acted the role of nemesis in European culture and in the global conquests of that Europe. On the other hand, it was felt as a sort of numbing of a once vital organ.

Ps – in some ways, the gothic horrors of Sade are too infernal, too brightly lit by the Christianity that follows his every step like a shadow. One could extract another logical line, from the dissolution of all norms to poshlost’ – the world of banality. Magris, in a sense, goes wrong by not putting in this vital step. Contra Hannah Arendt, Eichman’s evil is not something that accidentally arises from banality – banality is the original and primal form of evil in the world. We follow Gogol here, per Merezhovsky. Instead of Juliette, the Petty Demon. From which I take this wonderful extract – Peredonov, the “hero”, a schoolteacher, has just come home to his mistress, Varvara, who he calls his cousin. He’s promised to marry her, but is suspicious that she won’t come through on her end of the bargain, which is to make him an inspector. Besides, Peredenov is suspicious that she is poisoning him. He is also suspicious, every time he hears someone laugh in front of him, that they are laughing at him. And, to finish up this summary of his qualities, he prefers not to think, but believes anything he is told. So Peredenov naturally decides to torment Varvara by making her believe he has been over at the next door neighbors, paying court to their daughter, Marta:

She's covered with freckles," said Varvara, spitefully.
" And she's got a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. You might as well sew up her mouth, like a frog's."
"Anyway, she's handsomer than you," said Peredonov."I think I'll take her and marry her."
" You dare marry her," shouted Varvara, reddening and trembling with rage, "and I'll burn her eyes out with vitriol !"
"I'd like to spit on you," said Peredonov, quite calmly.
"Just try it !" said Varvara.
"Well, I will," answered Peredonov.
He rose, and with a sluggish and indifferent expression, spat in her face.
"Pig !"said Varvara, as quietly as if his spitting on her had refreshed her. And she began to wipe her facewith a table napkin. Peredonov was silent. Latterly he had been more brusque with her than usual. And evenin the beginning he had never been particularly gentlewith her. Encouraged by his silence, she repeated more loudly :
"Pig ! You are a pig !"

This joyful scene is interrupted by the entrance of a friend, Volodin. Drinks and jam tarts are served. And then:

“Suddenly Peredonov splashed the dregs of his coffee cup on the wall-paper. Volodin goggled his sheepish eyes, and gazed in astonishment. The wall-paper was soiled and torn. Volodin asked:
" What are you doing to your wall-paper ?"
Peredonov and Varvara laughed.
"It's to spite the landlady," said Varvara. " We're leaving soon. Only don't you chatter."
"Splendid !' shouted Volodin, and joined in the laughter.
Peredonov walked up to the wall and began to wipe the soles of his boots on it. Volodin followed his example.
Peredonov said :
" We always dirty the walls after every meal, so that they'll remember us when we've gone !"
" What a mess you've made !' exclaimed Volodin,delightedly.
" Won't Irishka be surprised," said Varvara, with a dry, malicious laugh.
And all three, standing before the wall, began to spit at it, to tear the paper, and to smear it with their boots. Afterwards, tired but pleased, they ceased.

Peredonov bent down and picked up the cat, a fat, white, ugly beast. He began to torment the animal, pulling its ears, and tail, and then shook it by the neck. Volodin laughed gleefully and suggested other methods of tormenting the animal.
"Ardalyon Borisitch, blow into his eyes ! Brush his fur backwards !"
The cat snarled, and tried to get away, but dared not show its claws. It was always thrashed for scratching. At last this amusement palled on Peredonov and he let the cat go.”

And I got an A + in Macro and Onanism!

The attack on the stimulus plan is unsurprising, coming as it does from the usual redoubts of the gated community wealthy – the NYT business page, Rush Limbaugh, the Democratic and Republican parties.

The plan is one wing of the Obama schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are given a stimulus supposedly big enough to combat a recession that will last at least the year. On the other hand, we are given a bank plan tacitly premised on the idea that the financial section will be returning to its old glory any day now, thanks to the splendor of the self-adjusting market.

The little thread that ties these things together is the housing market. It is as if the media sphere decided to throw Marx a surprise party: in his honor, they are demonstrating just what commodity fetishism means. The housing market has been curiously disembedded it real location in the world of social labor, and transported into the never land of econospeak and graphs. In the never land, there is never and there will never be any mention of the one overriding fact about the housing market, which is that houses are actually bought by people.

As I have pointed out again and again, like an erotomaniac compulsively returning to the habit of masturbating in public when released from his straight jacket, this is what happens when inequality reaches a tipping point. The half baked neo-liberal theory upon which the American economy has stood for three decades supposes that certain social goods (retirement, healthcare, education, etc.) can be ultimately provided for in the private sphere. How is this accomplished? By making the average household not only a unit of production, but also a source of investment. Thus, X and Y, the double wage-earners in the household, will enjoy a progressively better lifestyle even if their combined earnings stagnate or advance slowly, because they will have socked away money in their 401(k)s and IRAs and they will have invested in an asset, a house, that will bring them a healthy return even as they live in it. It is a bubble gum vision of the good life, worthy less of the American Economic Journal than Teen Beat magazine.

The flaw, of course, is that income counts. It counts so much that if you freeze it or slow down its increase in order to feed the wealthy (who, after all, are investors like all of us! It is the solidarity of capital, here, one for all, or – getting real, heh heh heh – all for one), who, pray tell, are X and Y going to sell their asset to? Another X and Y, in basically the same circumstances? Any child can tell you that no matter how often two poor shits sells a commodity back and forth to each other at higher and higher prices, which they borrow, the end result is not going to be that each gets infocommercial wealthy – it is going to be that each gets financially broken. The commodity didn’t do that. What did that has been doing that for a long time. It is called your Government. Plus your private sector. Check it out. Open your eyes. The Fed has openly tried to batter the bargaining position of labor for years. The commerce department, for decades, has held seminars for businesses about how they can move to labor cheap locales. The industrial policy of the U.S. government – which claims it has no industrial policy – has been directed, for years, at keeping incomes down and credit lines at high interest open.

The houses are just the cargo in the zona.

This story is not complex. Any junkie can rehearse that narrative arc.

Thus, it rather breaks my heart to see how the debate on the stimulus, among the liberal bloggers and pundits, so quickly turned into a debate about who could make smarter references to the economist’s abracadabra. This is what happens when your liberal pundicrats were brought up on debating and going to a good college. Matters of fact get entangled with the meritocrats favorite thing: taking a test. Having been malformed by an educational system that identifies thinking with test scores, the meritocrats, in Pavlovian synch, all salivated when the right attacked with “economics”, and they are busy having fun chasing fallacies off the cliff in some distant part of the world. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will be gained by showing that Krugman is right and Fama is wrong. Or rather, much will be lost. For instance, the opportunity to point out that the “economist’s” standard model of the U.S. economy is a fantasy that hasn’t been true since 1929. That, in fact, if full employment really meant full employment by the private sector, the Great Depression never ended – for the private sector can not and will not and will never employ even 85 percent of the employable population in any developed state, and in the U.S. in particular, is doing good when it employs 80 percent of the population. “Fiscal policy” isn’t some newfangled government toy, but the structure that has held up the American economy for seventy years. It is crazy to talk about “crowding out”, or “Ricardian equivalence”, before understanding the composition of the target economy. An economic theory that technically disallows the economic reality all around us for the last sixty years is, well, did I mention public masturbation already?

What needs to be done will be done too late. Cut the juice to the banks. Capitalize a national back for reindustrialization, and one to extend consumer credit at @ 7 points higher than the Fed loans money to banks. Pump money into the states. Massive command and control interventions by the government to coordinate at least two major changes in the national economy – the energy sector and transportation. Politics, in other words – politics should play the major role in our economy at the moment. Not “the market”, god help us.

the image of LI's art

The symbol of Irish art, for Stephen Daedelus, was the “cracked looking glass of a servant.” Ah, those mirrors – surely Buck Mulligan’s was related to Stendhal’s, who wrote, in The Red and the Black, that a novel is a mirror that one walks along a street. But such handling of mirrors requires care – they so easily slip out of one’s hands. And once they get a crack in them, the crack will leap out, like an imp, from realism to the real. For instance, Stendhal’s phrase is actually attributed to someone else – Saint-Réal. And who was Saint-Réal? Some critics say that he was no person, but Stendhal himself – who thus quotes a saint of reality who doesn’t exist, carrying a mirror in which he doesn’t look at himself - for what would he see - down a street. Lawrence Scher, in his book on French realism, writes: “by all accounts, the reference to Saint-Réal is spurious, for the quote has never been found in Saint-Réal’s work; thus we can immediately consider the remark to be an ironic commentary on the very process of verisimilitude.”

Others would say that this Saint-Réal must be the same as the author of the Conjurations des Espagnols contre Venise, which Saintsbury claims is a masterpiece of style. Also according to Saintsbury, Saint-Réal associated with the libertines around Saint-Evremond and ended up as the historiographer for the Duke of Savoy.

Scher's remark would seem to answer all questions except one – why did Stendhal feel the need to invoke Saint-Réal at all? Which helps us notice that Stendhal does not quote from one of Saint-Réal’s works, but quotes the man - as though this were a phrase in a conversation, an oral delivery. This is all the more possible in that Stendhal, like Saint-Réal, frequented circles in London and Italy which were infused with both the moraliste precept that history is a great reserve of exempla and the hardheaded materialist psychology of amour-propre (which was transmuted, via Cabanis, into a mystifying discourse about nervous impulses). Of course, a full century stands between Stendhal and Saint-Réal, during which even the wittiest remarks tend to be forgotten. So perhaps Scher is right, and Stendhal made up the remark and hung it on Saint-Réal as a joke. Although the joke depends, for its success, on there being such a thing as “realism”, which wasn’t the case when the Red and the Black was written.

We walk down the street and turn and walk down another street and turn and we are back on the street we began with. Thus, the phrase is not only a spurious attribution to the saint of realism, but a joke of which the punchline is also a prophecy. Well, as Wittgenstein said, he could imagine a work of philosophy consisting entirely of jokes. Which is not a thing he wrote down himself – he said this in a conversation with Norman Malcolm, who wrote it down in a memoir. And there it stands, the mirror of Wittgenstein’s thought, not Malcolm’s – to whom the phrase is never attributed.

All of which is by way of a preface to another symbol of the art of the novel. This comes from the Ludwig Hohl. As is always the case in the Notizen, Hohl’s jottings seem to come out of the air of the ordinary – a walk down the street with no mirror at all, or blue days in his little room under the bar in that working class section of Berne. So, Hohl is writing about strength and exercise – or performance, Leistung. Hohl, as always, seems on the edge of losing control of his topics. This is fatal, since it is the equivalent of becoming boring, even to oneself. I, for instance, am almost always at that point, as this blog abundantly illustrates. But the crooked genius inside of Hohl understands, like a shape shifting messiah, that the air of the ordinary is only a disguise, only another disguise. Hohl ends the note on muscular strength with this story:

“Hard earned strength”, they say – do they imagine that the opposite is stolen strength? I once saw a man in the circus who lifted with one arm a weight on which was written, 200 Kilos. He lifted it up to his head and, always using just one arm, over his head, with obviously the most extreme effort; and as the weight had reached the end of his outstretched, upward arm, then it lifted itself all alone somewhat higher and – o unforgettable sight! – kept climbing up to the ceiling of the circus, pulled by a string – for it was made out of cardboard.”

O unvergesslicher Eindruck! Here, indeed, is an image of art for you. Here, among the popcorn chewing innocents, we suddenly catch a glimpse of the imp of realism, that most fabulous of cryptozoological creatures, as it tries to make its escape.

spies from the house of love

In Gunzberg, on his itinerary down the Danube, Claudio Magris was reminded of one of its most famous citizens, Joseph Mengele. Mengele was hidden by the monks at Gunzberg after WWII, who then helped him ratline it to South America. In 1959, he was so confident that Adenauer’s Germany wasn’t too interested in his ass that he returned for his father’s funeral. Upon Mengele’s story – the banal bureaucrat who used to “hurl babies into the fire, tear infants from their mother’s breast and dash their brains out, extract fetuses from the womb… gouge out eyes, which he kept threaded on strings and hung on the walls of his room, and then sent to Prof. Otran van Vershauer (Director of the Berlin Institute of Anthropology, and a professor at Munster University even after 1953)”, Magris hangs his complaint about the cult of transgression. Magris starts by laying down a liberal principle that perhaps two thirds of Americans would disagree with – “As long as transgression is applied to codes of sexual behavior things are easy, because infractions of erotic taboos do not constitute evil if performed by responsible persons and inflicting no harm on others” (92) – a strangely naïve view of sexuality. But having laid this down as an “easy” principle – it being easy to argue for if one simply pays no attention to history, experience, the cultural codes that have been in place for millennia, and other trivialities – Magris makes the ‘hard” argument – or is it easy? that transgression equals Mengele.

Joseph Frank’s group evidently crystallized around transgression – in fact, the rumor about Frank is that he destroyed a Talmud in front of his followers. He also, like many Sabbataians, found no reason not to seem to convert – in his case, not to Islam, as did Sabbatai Zev, but to Christianity, signaling to those who could read the signs that he was the successor to Jesus Christ. To do this in Poland in 1760 was a transgression against the very survival of Judaism, or at least so the rabbis thought. And they had an excellent case.

Magris, of course, is not arguing against the messianic impulse, but rather, against the notion, made intellectually fashionable in the 70s by the posthumous edition of Bataille’s work, that transgression was a way out of the iron cage of the liberal, bourgeois lifestyle – a lifestyle in which, among other things, it is “easy” to argue for infractions of erotic taboos, since after all, sex is exactly equal to and only about pleasure. As such, tabooing consensual fun and games is silly – it is all chocolate, anyway. Chantilly. Lace.

However, Magris (I am being harsh about him here, but I do like the little essays that make up the Danube) has at least found the right problem. Of course, that problem was found long before – Artaud found it in Heliogabule, and Bataille took it up as his life task. Given an unequal social order, how can the powerful possibly transgress? Mengele received a salary from the state. When Beria had Meyerhold, the greatest theater director of the twentieth century, some say, taken to the Lubyanka and beaten on a regime that soon left him so crippled he couldn’t stand – then had his wife murdered – then moved into his apartment in Leningrad, perhaps on the same day they shot Meyerhold, burned his body, and mingled his ashes with a thousand others that they dumped in a grave – he was not transgressing.

And it was against this “glitch” in the social order, a glitch that caused and forgot the wars, the terror famines, the conquests, that the idea of transgression came about.

I’ve already given a hasty outline of libertinage in a number of posts from last year. In brief, my idea was that the standard story was skewed a little too much by the end of the story, the decline of libertinage in the eighteenth century. Volupte, I claimed, was a central and crystallizing libertine idea, but it was not, in the seventeenth century, synonymous with sensual pleasure. Rather, it was a social pleasure, firstly, and it was closer to what Edmund Burke, in his Essay on the Sublime, called delight. It was a delight that waited at the portals of the senses as the senses opened to nature, as the senses became nature. And that opening was made in defiance of the supernatural order – but it preceded the very idea that the world was human. In its defiance, it generated a code of revolt that naturally gravitated to the great Christian model of revolt: Satan’s. Those who read Paradise Lost and identified with Satan at the end of the 18th century were not engaged in a total misreading: after all, the Milton who wrote that epic was a regicide. In France, alas, the wrong king was beheaded –surely Louis XIV deserved that honor. A maker of battlefields and hunger. But the Fronde, which gathered free thinkers, “bold spirits” to itself, failed.

So when the volupte of the libertines was transformed, in the eighteenth century, to sexual pleasure, the transformation was part of the collapse of the original libertine agenda, in which the human limit existed, briefly, outside of any sacred sanction. However, even as volupte was being transformed, the gesture of defiance, dimly linked to Lucifer, transposed itself to new modalities. The mechanical libertine and the mesmerist met on unexpected psychological and social levels. Just as there is a Marxism of the people, symbolic understandings of commodity fetishism that crop up where a more fully developed capitalism meets an economy in which exchange value has not yet become hegemonic, so, too, messianic movements that center around transgression are a form of the libertinism of the people. At least, one can hypothesize that this is happening, in the oddest way, at the intersection of Poland, Russia and the Ottoman empire in the 18th century.

Of course, the fantastic conjunction of gnosticism and libertinage has a long presence in our collective dream life. Norman Cohen has shown that the story of a esoteric group that engages in sexual orgies to break the social ties of the members and incorporate them into the worship of strange gods – that total cosmic reorientation – is told and retold about the Christians (by the Romans), the Cathars, the witches, the Jews, the Templars. Galinsky’s report could be put in the category of myth, except for the fact that we know such things also happen. There is something psychologically plausible in the fact that Jacob Frank became the seigneur of sexual bestiality, keeping a cold eye on the couplings of his followers, after his wife died. Was it at this point that he made his daughter, Eva, the mother of God?

Eva Frank. Driving about Offenbach in a carriage, visiting respectable houses, dying well off. One wonders, I wonder, about her story.

Fringe viewpoints, and yet it is here that I see so many crossings – Marx with Michelet’s Sorciere, Nietzsche with Jacob Frank, Hazlett with Huene-Wronsky. All the spies in the artificial paradise, sleeper cells from the very beginning.

Jan Potocki among the Khazars

“… we arrived at last at [the aoul] of Din-Islam, where we saw from a long ways off a crowd that parted before us.

Our first homage was for the troop of young girls who had gathered together on a hillside around a swing; but at our approach these savage persons quit their games, and in advancing we saw no more than a pile of silk veils.

Then Tumen addressed himself to them in the Nogai language, making them a compliment in the following sense: that they need have no fear of us, seeing that we had not come to do them any harm, but only to ask them to dance. The gentle words, accompanied by the music of the kabour, tamed these young beauties, who deigned to lift their veils and show us the ends of their flat noses; then, two got up and advanced towards us. A musician lifted their veils, and at that signal they began to dance; but their eyes were so cast down that I believed they were completely shut. Besides, they lacked neither an ear for the measure nor grace in the arms. When they finished, they put their two hands over their faces with the air of modest embarrassment; the musician pulled back down their veils, and they stepped away.” – Jan Potocki, August 20, 1797

Lamartines

Alphone de Lamartine, who knew Joseph de Maistre, described him, after he was dead, as being “large [d’une grande taille,], handsome and male of form and face.” Madame Swetchine, who also knew de Maistre, was taken aback by those lines: “M. de Lamartine says that he saw a lot of M. de Maistre. The number of those meetings makes it all the more surprising that his description of the man was misleading to such a degree. Not one touch was precise or faithful to the original. Count de Maistre was of middling size, and his features were irregular. There was nothing incisive in his eye, to which his short sightedness lent something lost in his gaze. This irregular, and not very brilliant face nevertheless had a majestic radiance.”

The witnesses summoned by the historians are all fed their lines by someone, usually the insatiable self, the vulgarian whose dirty fingers are even in our hot tears. Leaving fingerprints. Lamartine is the biggest goose of French literature, with his tedious lyrics and his lukewarm liberal politics. He is the very type of the sots from whom Baudelaire, later, begged in vain for a break to keep him from slipping into the abyss of want and madness. Madame Swetchine, bless her soul, did not reckon that there was a stye in Lamartine’s eye – his ego. The problem with history is that it is packed with Lamartines. The process is fucked, the jury is packed, the judge is limited by his caseload, his languages, his headache, his faulty hardons.

Any good carpenter knows a rotten two by four. Anyone with a nose for it knows a rotten fact. But we have to build with available materials.

Scholem’s picture of Jacob Frank is takes the picture of Frank that was promoted by, among others, Heinrich Graetz, who wrote a popular history of the Jews in the 1880s. Graetz even devoted a whole book to Frankism. In his history, Graetz wrote that “Jankiev Lejbovicz (that is, Jacob son of Leb) of Galicia, was one of the worst, most subtle, and most deceitful rascals of the eighteenth century.”

Graetz’s sketch is of a monster, a man who “boasted of …how he had duped his own father.” Yet Graetz’s sketch contains several of those rotten facts – for instance, Graetz ignores Frank’s father’s own adherence to the Sabbatain messianic cult. Graetz portrays Frank as a sort of Figaro or Sganarelle, alert for the scam, “traveling in Turkey in the service of a Jewish gentleman” . Others however have connected the Turkish travel with the study of the Kaballah, particularly the Zohar, which seems to have tied Frank to the Salonika community. In any case, much of this material is simply transmitted from one denunciation to another.

In 1967, Oskar K. Rabinowicz published an article on Frank in the Jewish Quarterly Review that reported his discovery of documents passed between Habsburg officials between Brno and Vienna, the most important of which was the testimony of a penitenti, a former Frankist.

Frank, with the great pomp that seemed to attend all of his arrivals, entered Brno, the capital of Moravia, with a train of 17 people in 1773. He immediately informed the authorities of his whereabouts, and presented three passports. He went to the Blauer Loewe, then took up quarters in the home of “freeman Pitsch.”

The entourage alarmed Brno officials. His story did too. He told them he “hailed from Smyrna”, with which he was connected on matters of business. In an interview with the police, he claimed to own grazing land in Poland and be a trader in livestock.

“Von Zollern reports further in the same document that his additional enquiries showed that Frank’s and his people’s behavior was beyond reproach, that they actually lived off his means, and that he had not contracted any debts.”

A year went by, and then the Brno officials received word from Vienna that this Frank had been accused of claiming to be the anti-Christ. He had been jailed in Czestochowa, and released in 1770.

Why the sudden interest? According to Rabinowicz, the Viennese officials were responding to a complaint lodged by Jacob Galinsky, a former follower. Galinsky’s immediate concern was that Frank owed him 1000 ducats. But Galinsky was more concerned that Frank was a devil. Concerned enough that he had sent letters to Marie Theresa, and that he sent documents to the Brno officials. According to Galinsky, Jacob Frank was born in Karlupke ‘as the son of a Jewish teacher who, having been found to be an adherent of Sabbatai Zevi, had lost his job and settled with his family in Wallachia”. This testimony is interesting in itself, in that there is another story about Frank’s heritage which has spread in the histories, in which it is claimed that Frank’s father was an innkeeper. There is obviously a Lamartine in our chain of evidence. However, as Galinsky is convinced that Frank is a very evil man, I’d give him some credit – besides which, he is a contemporary witness.

Galinsky, according to his own account, accepted Frank’s revelation of himself as Sabbatai Zevi – the shapeshifter messiah, who is now Islamic, now Christian, but in actuality remains hidden behind public ceremonies – like the Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure, he is a Lord of Dark Corners.

It was in Warsaw that Galinsky started to become alienated from Frank. Frank had declared that none of his followers would die – much as Jesus did in the Gospels – and some did die. Death, Frank claimed, only showed that these followers had lacked faith. When complaints were made and Frank was sent to the jail/monastery in Czestochowa, Galinsky went with him. Then the second blow against Galinsky’s faith occurred – Frank’s wife died. After she died, “Frank began preaching immoral behavior, even acts against human nature. Galinsky became his open enemy, and returned to his own wife and child in Warsaw. His wife rejoined Frank in 1772, and had lived since then with Frank in Brno. Yet, while separated from Galinsky she nevertheless informed him about a Frankist plot to kill him and the other opponents of Frank.”

Finally, this is how Frank lived in Brno, according to Galinsky: all his servants were baptized Jews only. Every two weeks men and women arrived in Brno from all over the land, and brought Frank presents. These adherents wre so devoted to him that they kissed his feet, remained a few days near him, and then returned home.”

This report may seem damning, especially since Galinsky claimed he was even eager to confront Frank, should it be necessary. But, as Rabinowicz remarks, “an air of enlightenment” accompanied Joseph II’s accession to the throne, and the Vienna bureaucracy was now indifferent to sectarian disputes. They simply advised Zollner to keep a good eye on Frank.

Over the past three months, I’ve been dancing in many threads – that of suicide, that of free love, that of universal history. This thread is on the linki between libertinism and messianism.

the prophets of baal in the zona

20So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto mount Carmel.
21And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.
22Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men.
23Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under:
24And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.
25And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under.
26And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.


27And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.

In the 2004 election in which the people elected the guy who’d stood by when the WTC was attacked and invaded Iraq because he fucking felt like it, I was bummed about the whole United States thing. However, “Even LI sees one 'ray of hope' in the election -- Tom Daschle, a leader of utmost smallness, a stunted mediocrity whose instincts have lead the Democrats from defeat to defeat, was defeated himself.”

That Daschle, that Great Fly minion, is not going to have his paws on the health care plan is excellent news. The story of his D.C. lifestyle is unsurprising. It is part of the political marketplace that the fucks in the Congress and the fucks in the Executive are bribed with the promise of future spoils.

But then there are those who are wired bribed. Like Larry Summers. Before he was appointed head of the board of Economic advisors, LI warned, we blasted, we pleaded in our little corner of the world that Summers press corps claque be ignored. Summers is a neo-liberal through and through – hence, his knee jerk reaction to the bank crisis has been that “government” is bad at running banks – why, then they would be run for political reasons! This, of course, is the kind of nonsense they churn out in Chicago, where the pretense is that the market is ‘non-political’. And so we non-politically get a collapse. Of course, all of that is horseshit. Politics is a market and the market is political. In fact, the claim that the market, whatever that is, is non-political is a political move, a way of saying that politics is irrational – or, in other words, that politics allows people without economic power to influence economic outcomes. Like, the common working people. Can’t have that!

Summers apparently has not noticed the Fed, nor Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The latter got in trouble because they… followed the market. They tried to follow the beaucoup bucks for the upper management racket so popular at clip joints like WAMU. They wanted, as Bob Rubin would say, to move into more risk – since it would pay off for shareholders. The lesson is not that banks shouldn’t be political, the lesson is that the semi-privatization of government functions hasn’t worked. Private is not good, public is not bad. Good and bad are determined by the scope of the function, its benefit to the social welfare, its cost, etc. At the present time, it looks like Summers and Geithner are actually going to continue Paulson-omics – the bank robbery, on a trillion dollar scale, performed by the banks – which is premised on the idea, laughable but still held by the deadenders, that after this temporary bump, things will go back to normal. Yes, those mortgages will be redeemed as an opulent population goes back to selling 300 thou McMansions to each other in the suburbs of Phoenix. You can tell that the crowd that doesn’t get it has the upper hand at the moment. My favorite stupor economist of the moment, much favored in the center-liberal mags, Edward Glaeser, popped his hand up and stuttered out the conventional wisdom yesterday with his lighthearted look at the Super Bowl, which included this howler:

“The fact that Phoenix has experienced a 42 percent housing price drop since its June 2006 peak is a sign of the area’s strength, not weakness. The high housing prices were always unsustainable, because of Phoenix’s capacity to build. Unrestricted supply meant the price boom was always a mirage. The decline in prices reflects the ability of Phoenix’s great growth machine to create inexpensive housing.”

Right. The growth machine created inexpensive housing. That’s so sweet! And they did it thinking they were producing expensive housing. The invisible hand, don’t you know.

When everything proves the market is self-adjusting, it is easy to be an economist. Anybody can do it.

The Glaesers multiply in the media, which is stocked full of the rancid and the wrong. It is one of the things I love about the NYT’s economix blog – it is like reading Judy Miller on Iraq. Read today’s Casey Mulligan commentary and laugh your ass off. This crew of the botched gives one clues about the zona and its long reach. The zona, after all, is not just a ghost wind, but it is conjured up by, or rather conjoined with, the spell of the magicians. Our magicians are all into that white magic mojo. They are the white magicians par excellence, who think backwards is equal to forwards. The winds blow higher, and the hurricanoes come, and the white magicians say, don’t worry! The weather is self-adjusting.

Rot/Salvation/Happiness

I came across the story of Jacob Frank in Czeslow Milosz’s History of Polish Literature. I was looking up Jan Potocki (whose Turkish valet, Ibrahim, is, for some reason, given the name Osman by Milosz – out of such small deviations in the constant rain of microscopic facts come our free will and our myths).

Milosz wrote that Frank came from a family of Sabbateans – Jews who followed the heretical beliefs of the Sabbatai Zevi. His family fled to Turkey, which is where he had a vision of Poland as the promised land. “Upon his return there, he was greeted enthusiastically, mostly by poor folks opposing the rabbis, but also by some Jewish notables. Frank, as a new messiah, proclaimed the end of Jewish law and, as a matter of fact, of all law – “I have come to abolish all laws and religions in order to bring life to the world.” The ascent to the kingdom of freedom and wealth was to be accomplished by a descent into abomination and perversion. A Manichean tradition, so strong in the Balkans, is clearly perceivable in Frank’s teachings. Evil was to be overcome by doing evil, sin by sinning. The Frankists, like the Hasidim, practiced ecstatic dancing and singing accompanied by the clapping of hands, but also held orgiastic rituals whereby men and women undressed “to see truth in its nakedness” and copulated indiscriminately – while only the leader stood apart. Frank interpreted the idea of the mystic trinity in the cabbala as a union of the Holy Primeval (attika kadisha); the Holy King (Malka kadisha, who was the messiah (Frank himself); and the Primeval Mother (Matronita elyona), who was none other than Frank’s daughter, Eve.”

Frank’s followers were brought up before the Polish authorities by the orthodox rabbis, but turned the tables by “converting” – baptism being the lowest and most abasing thing one could do. Apparently the Christians themselves, after gloating about the conversions, began to suspect that Frank was not what he seemed, and ‘imprisoned’ him for thirteen years in a monastery, Czestochowa, where he was – oh how loose the world can become – inexplicably given leaway to practice his own rituals. His followers slowly filled up the region, and he was well supplied with money. Eventually, he ‘migrated to Offenbach in Germany, where, as “Count Frank”, he was surrounded by a mounted bodyguard in fanciful uniforms and used to drive in a princely coach. The French Revolution seemed to be an accomplishment of Frank’s prophecies, and many Frankists joined the Jacobins (among them, the heir apparent and nephew of Frank, known in Vienna under the name of Frank Thomas Edler von Schoenfeldt, and his brother Emanuel), only to be beheaded on the guillotine in 1794 along with Danton.”

Milosz’s source for this information is evidently Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s friend, whose essay about Frank, Redemption through Sin, was, according to the famous Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano, “perhaps one of his greatest essays”. Steven Wasserstrom makes the case for a parallel with Pierre Klossowski’s essay on Sade, “The Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution”, given in 1939 to the College of Sociology. The connecting link here is Klossowski and Scholem’s mutual friend, Walter Benjamin. Klossowski had this to say about Sade’s notion of evil: ‘the evil must, therefore, erupt once and for all; the bad seed has to flourish so the mind can tear it out and consume it. In a word, evil must be made to prevail once and for all in the world so that it will destroy itself and so Sade’s mind can find peace.” [quoted, Wasserstrom, 1999:219]
This is Scholem’s summary of Frankism:

“. . . just as a grain of wheat must rot in the earth before it can sprout, so the deeds of the
“believers” must be truly “rotten” before they can germinate the redemption. This
metaphor, which appears to have been extremely popular, conveys the whole of sectarian
Sabbatian psychology in a nutshell: in the period of transition, while the redemption is still in
a state of concealment, the Torah in its explicit form must be denied, for only thus can it too
become “concealed” and ultimately renewed.”

One might wonder why Milosz would even include a mention of the Frankists in a history of Polish literature. He was no doubt influenced by Mickiewicz, who mentioned the Frankists indirectly in his lectures on Poland before the College de France in the 1840s. After discussing the political mystic and mathematician, Wronski, who proclaimed the religious mission of Napoleon, Mickiewicz adds:

I would draw your attention to the fact that during this time, in Poland, there were numerous Israelite sects, half Christian and half Jewish, which were also messianic, and which believed to see in Napoleon a messiah or at least a precursor.” [Les Slaves, Mickiewicz 306]

According to Abraham Duker, ‘A correspondent from Warsaw in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1838 referred to Mickiewicz as a Frankist “belonging to our nation.” [Duker, 1963, 292]

To be continued

chop off the heads of the bankers and kick them down the street - a modest suggestion

Read Paul Krugman's column today. I didn't think it would be too long before the odious Summers (did I say the guy was the worst, the very worst, for the job? I couldn't believe Obama appointed him head of the economic council - a mistake that he is going to regret, I think) pissed off Krugman.

When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.

“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.

But I must quote myself from my October 30 2008 post, all the money in the world. Since that post has proven to be totally correct. I'd brag about being a prophet, except millions and millions of poor people just like me saw the same thing. You had to be an economist to believe the bullshit:

"As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks."

the talking royal heads -1

In September, 1783, the visitor in search of virtuoso curiosa could go to see the two bronze talking heads designed by Abbè Mical on display at Rue de Temple, Marais, in Paris. Mical had been working on his design for thirty years, or so we are told by Antoine de Rivarol, who wrote an enthusiastic report about the heads in the Journal de Paris that evidently benefited from some inside information. “These two bronze heads speak and pronounce clearly entire phrases.” According to Rivarol, Mical had designed a kind of keyboard (clavier) which responded to pins attached to a cylinder in the same way you turn a crank to get a sound out of music box.

And what did the two heads say? “The king has just brought peace to Europe.” “The peace crowns the king with glory.” “Peace makes for the happiness of the people.” [Memoires de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris, 1878 3:5 259]

Mircal had apparently made a previous head or two, but, as they weren’t good enough, he destroyed them. He presented his heads to the Academie in the hope that he could sell them to the court. They were, after all, eminently royal heads. Unfortunately, Mical did not find a buyer, and destroyed them. Then he died, of a fabulously broken heart, in 1789. Or so goes one version of history. In another version, another branch of events that could have happened, he did find a buyer and they disappeared into that buyer’s cabinet of curiosities. And his deathdate, along this branch, is more uncertain.

It is said that Mical was shy, yet he seemed to find a way into the newspapers well enough. In 1783, his hand might have been forced, as there were two other automaton makers in Paris at the time, also promoting talking machines – a Dane named Kratzenstein and the famous Kempelen, who displayed the Turk, the chess playing automaton, at the Café de las Régence that year. The Turk was a mystery to two generations, defeated in chess both Frederick the Great and Napoleon, and ended up, in the 1830s, in America, where the solution to its human-like mastery was deduced by one E.A. Poe, who witnessed the machine in an exhibit in Richmond, Virginia.

To read the signs and portents of carnival shows and curiosity cabinets is no mean feat, but surely Rivarol must have felt some kind of prognostic shiver. These two royal talking heads pointed to more than the future of phonetics.

In the 19th century, Rivarol was considered to be the equal and opposite of Chamfort. In the 20th century, the French fascist Bardeche named a magazine for him – a magazine that became a favorite of Le Pen’s circle, apparently. But though the candle is still lit for him on the extreme right, few would consider him on the level of Chamfort today. Even before the revolution, they were a curious pair, a duo of talking heads who dominated conversation with their talent for hit and run epigrams. Chamfort, of course, went to the left (“Peace makes for the happiness of the people”) and Rivarol eventually emigrated to become a great propagandist for reaction, an unhesitating liar. Chamfort, when he was young, was considered strikingly handsome; Rivarol, when he was eighteen and studying for the priesthood – for which his father intended him – in Avignon, was known to the ladies as la belle abbé. [Lescure 37]

Rivarol derived from Italian nobility who had transplanted themselves into France. One of his first books was a prose translation of Dante into French. Like so many ambitious minds from the provinces, Rivarol came to Paris to make a name as a writer, a philosophe, and, not least, to escape his father’s plan for him. “Rivarol est né grand seigneur dans un cabaret,’ as Houssaye said – to paraphrase which we can say that his nobility was a sort of stand-up comic’s routine. He had a cutting tongue, and odd tastes for an enlightenment figure – not only Dante, but Pascal. However, his first real fame came in a very eighteenth century way. An academy in Berlin asked for essays responding to the question, why had French become the predominant language in Europe? The question was asked in 1785, but already German was being spoken at the Prussian court again, as Frederick the Great’s influence waned. Frederick, famously, thought German was for swine. Rivarol wrote an essay on the universality of French – you didn’t think we were giving up the universal thread, did you? that won the prize and marked, although Rivarol didn’t know it, the end of a certain ancien regime tone.

back to the universal history - of infamy

In 1810, Jan Potocki sent Joseph de Maistre an essay in which Potocki speculated that there were several floods that happened in several regions at several epochs of the earth’s history. De Maistre sent back a letter defending Biblical chronology. He divided his defense into sections, beginning with the metaphysical. About which he says:

“It [metaphysics] teaches that everything has been made by and for the intelligence; that man began with science, and not in a state of barbarity, as all of the 18th century school falsely and stupidly supposed; that the perfectibility of man and his taste for science is only the secret instinct of his nature, which moves him to return to his native state; that the state of the savage, which one has called the state of nature, is precisely the contrary of nature and the last degree of human degredation; that it is thus impossible to reason worse than those have done who argue the state of sciences at a point in time distant from antiquity in order to suppose a crowd of anterior centuries necessary for gradually leading up to such a state of human knowledge. We cry out: how much time was necessary to arrive at this point! – Plato would respond to us: without a doubt, if nobody learned was taught what they would have learned… The human families that depart from the state of barbarism have nothing in common with primitive man, who was, following the happy expression of Seneca, Diis recentes.” Maistre, correspondance, 238

I don’t know if De Maistre ever read William Paley and his famous example of the design of the world – a watch found out in the grass. Paley’s point was that such a watch indicated intelligence. But de Maistre would see under that comparison the degenerate theory of evolution, or progress – for there are no single watches in the world. Watches are produced by watch factories, and watchmakers use instruments and parts that evolved elsewhere – for instance, the little grooved wheels that first evolved for taking water out of wells – to make the watch. Design leads us to evolution, which leads us inevitably to progress. De Maistre, of course, sees the world in inverse terms, as a place that is condemned by original sin and only redeemed by the son of God. In his strict theology, there is no progress.

De Maistre is the metaphysician of the reaction. He of course knew Jan Potocki and his family. He knew him as a fellow mason. I’ve been threading about Marx’s notion of universal history in the Grundrisse. Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti-Oedipus asked, how can we find enough innocence to make universal history? Much of Anti-Oedipus is devoted to showing how universals were made, under the aegis of capitalism and the familialism that characterizes the Great Transformation – thus neatly bringing together two of my themes, that of free love and that of the role played by universal-makers in the construction of the World System. Potocki and de Maistre were both aware of, and both working on the margins of, the fashion, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for universal histories.

I wanted to backtrack from Marx to the formation of reactionary alienation. Since, more and more, I’ve come to think of Jan Potocki as a leading character in The Human Limit, it is fortunate that some of de Maistre’s most revealing letters were written to him.

Or rather, not fortunate. Around Potocki there comes into play myriad coincidences – he is a connector, a man with very short degrees of separation from many of the players in the transatlantic Revolutions. In other letters, Maistre refers to Potocki as a man who has helped him get books. He described Potocki going off to war in 1808, against Napoleon, bringing with him several Indian cockatoos – de Maistre loved the dandyish gesture.

Yet, in his letter to Potocki, he takes it upon himself to caution that irreligion is the infallible mark of scum – canaille.

zona mashup

Let us suppose the following case, Sâriputra. In a certain village, town, borough, province, kingdom, or capital, there was a certain housekeeper, old, aged, decrepit, very advanced in years, rich, wealthy, opulent; he had a great house, high, spacious, built a long time ago and old, inhabited by some two, three, four, or five hundred living beings.

ON Jan. 12, Richard Goodwin, who made a fortune building condominiums, publicly lamented his own real estate woes. In a letter to The Fisher Island Voice, an online forum for residents of this tiny, gilded island less than a mile off Miami, he wrote, “I have $1.2 million invested” in property here, and “I am suffering under a 40 percent meltdown of my net worth.”

The house had but one door, and a thatch; its terraces were tottering, the bases of its pillars rotten, the coverings and plaster of the walls loose. On a sudden the whole house was from every side put in conflagration by a mass of fire. Let us suppose that the man had many little boys, say five, or ten, or even twenty, and that he himself had come out of the house.

Until last year, some residents of the island thought it had special features that would help shield it from economic hurricanes. It’s only 20 minutes from Miami International Airport, and it attracts a wide range of buyers. About 70 percent of residents come from outside the United States. Moreover, its appeal extends beyond retirees, or families looking for a second home; many residents live on the island year-round.

That diversity was in full view at the beach club one morning, where guests were speaking English, Spanish and Russian. The crowd ranged from sedate grandparents surrounded by a clutch of family members to fit young men in $200 Vilebrequin swimsuits.

When the economy was soaring, few worried about the high cost of living here. But the downturn has created tension, and many residents are trying to rein in spending.
That’s tough to do when you live in a place where the board of the country club recently approved a plan to spend $60 million in upgrades. That has caused some tenants, like Mr. Goodwin, whose annual expenses run to $80,000 for a 720-square-foot home, to put his property up for sale.

Now, Sâriputra, that man, on seeing the house from every side wrapt in a blaze by a great mass of fire, got afraid, frightened, anxious in his mind, and made the following reflection: I myself am able to come out from the burning house through the door, quickly and safely, without being touched or scorched by that great mass of fire; but my children, those young boys, are staying in the burning house, playing, amusing, and diverting themselves with all sorts of sports. They do not perceive, nor know, nor understand, nor mind that the house is on fire, and do not get afraid. Though scorched by that great mass of fire, and affected with such a mass of pain, they do not mind the pain, nor do they conceive the idea of escaping.

Still, some of the island’s premier properties are for sale. Bruce McMahan, a hedge fund executive, has put his 7,300-square-foot condominium, which he used exclusively to entertain business associates, on the market, along with all its art, for $30 million.

Its walls are covered with copies of paintings from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The paintings were done by a team brought over from Russia by Mr. McMahan, who heads the Argent Funds Group. There is also a collection of Fabergé eggs and boxes and original correspondence from the Romanov family, which ruled imperial Russia, all housed in what is called the “Romanov bedroom.” Two Rodin sculptures adorn a terrace that fronts the ocean and is guarded by a German shepherd.

The man, Sâriputra, is strong, has powerful arms, and (so) he makes this reflection: I am strong, and have powerful arms; why, let me gather all my little boys and take them to my breast to effect their escape from the house. A second reflection then presented itself to his mind: This house has but one opening; the door is shut; and those boys, fickle, unsteady, and childlike as they are, will, it is to be feared, run hither and thither, and come to grief and disaster in this mass of fire. Therefore I will warn them. So resolved, he calls to the boys: Come, my children; the house is burning with a mass of fire; come, lest ye be burnt in that mass of fire, and come to grief and disaster. But the ignorant boys do not heed the words of him who is their well-wisher; they are not afraid, not alarmed, and feel no misgiving; they do not care, nor fly, nor even know nor understand the purport of the word 'burning;' on the contrary, they run hither and thither, walk about, and repeatedly look at their father; all, because they are so ignorant.

It’s all but impossible to live on the island and not belong to the country club, which offers access to golf, tennis, a spa and six of the seven restaurants. That helps explain why friction intensified with the decision in early 2008 to charge a $60 million assessment to redo the club, part of which was $16 million for a makeover of the spa, at a time when other costs were rising. Even though Fisher Island’s developer agreed to contribute $25 million toward modernizing the club, that still meant the balance would have to be paid by the members — a bill of about $54,000 a member, payable over 10 years.

Then the man is going to reflect thus: The house is burning, is blazing by a mass of fire. It is to be feared that myself as well as my children will come to grief and disaster. Let me therefore by some skilful means get the boys out of the house. The man knows the disposition of the boys, and has a clear perception of their inclinations. Now these boys happen to have many and manifold toys to play with, pretty, nice, pleasant, dear, amusing, and precious. The man, knowing the disposition of the boys, says to them: My children, your toys, which are so pretty, precious, and admirable, which you are so loth to miss, which are so various and multifarious, (such as) bullock-carts, goat-carts, deer-carts, which are so pretty, nice, dear, and precious to you, have all been put by me outside the house-door for you to play with. Come, run out, leave the house; to each of you I shall give what he wants. Come soon; come out for the sake of these toys. And the boys, on hearing the names mentioned of such playthings as they like and desire, so agreeable to their taste, so pretty, dear, and delightful, quickly rush out from the burning house, with eager effort and great alacrity, one having no time to wait for the other, and pushing each other on with the cry of 'Who shall arrive first, the very first?'

Rough Theory's Marx - a comment.

N. Pepperell is unfolding her dissertation chapters on Marx’s Capital on her blog. LI is finding them extremely helpful. We are, of course, all down and shit with N.P.’s framework of seeing Marx in terms of an “anthropology”: “many of these passages [in the first book of Capital] can be better understood as anthropological depictions of peculiar qualitative properties that are specific to capitalist societies – and often specific to quite limited dimensions of capitalist societies – but that present themselves to social actors in a decontextualised and apparently asocial form.” And we sign on the dotted line for this:

“I suggest that the form of the first chapter expresses what I take to be a substantive claim about the way in which capitalism itself possesses a theatrical character, due to its constitution of a set of social relations that are peculiarly disembedded from the human agents who enact them, rendering these agents into social actors in a particularly literal sense – into bearers of economic roles who, to the extent that they step forth onto what Marx often explicitly calls the economic stage, find themselves performing acts and voicing scripts that are in some meaningful sense not reducible to those agents’ personal subject positions, but are instead externalised and collectively-constituted parts that transcend the actors who happen to perform them in any particular production of capital.”

I love it that N.P. is picking up on the dramatological cues Marx is giving us here – which, I should say, continues a form of presentation that he first develops in his political writing, especially the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, which gives us, in one of Marx’s typical bolts of lightning, the idea that revolutions tend to a peculiar kind of ritualistic pattern, in which the actors put on the masks of the ancestors. It is a very Kenneth Burke-ian gesture, although I don’t want to imply that Pepperell’s overall approach is Burkian. All that is solid does not vanish into rhetoric. Still, it makes us think about the meaning of our last two posts, on Marx and vulgarity. As we noted, here, in a brief flicker, Marx describes the economy of satisfaction [Befriedigung] and dissatisfaction that defines the Modern in terms of the responses of the agents that inhabit it, with whatever degree of consciousness they bring with them to the Artificial Paradise. This is why vulgarity, seemingly a topic for the bitchery of flaneurs and aesthetes, not Marx, casts a light upon the erasure of the human limit – the overcoming of that Borniertheit of the classical polis.

Originally, I meant to dance this thread to the third chapter in the L’anti-oedipe, which is the one, you will recall, where Deleuze and Guattari make clear that they are engaging in creating a universal history – which is also a history of how universals were made. A history, then, of “chance” encounters – D. and G. adduce the encounter between private property and the market, but leave to the side – being French – the chance encounter that, as Lou Reed puts it, brought Columbus to New York – that is, the discovery of America. A discovery that created, in the docking of one boat, a population of the discovered. Event/epistemology/mass death. You gotta love it. Or commit suicide. Ladies and gents, I give you the modern.

But – well, I am pulled back to the time frame I set up for myself. I need to talk about Joseph de Maistre’s letter to Potocki, I need to talk about the irrevocable. I need, I need…

And yet, I can’t resist taking a sidelong look at D. and G.’s notion of encounter. What is this if not discovery? Discovery is one of those epistemological forms that slipped by Foucault – you could never tell, reading Les mots et les choses, that any new world had been discovered in the time frame he is using. Discovery isn’t included in the select vocabulary of the Classical episteme. This, I’ve always thought, is a big, puzzling hole in Foucault’s story, and where, if I were inclined to critique MF, I would start.

Marx and vulgarity, take two

In a comment to LI’s last post, Amie pointed to Kant’s notion of the sublime in the Critique of Judgement as one way – a back way – into what is going on in the passage from Marx’s Grundrisse that presents us with a curiously familiar semiotic of the ‘leveling’ that characterizes the transition from the ancient to the modern.

Curiously familiar in that many of the canonical critics of modernity – Flaubert and Nietzsche, to name two – spoke in this same language, and were often roundly drubbed for it by twentieth century Marxists. I’m thinking in particular of Lukacs. Surely there is something to Lukacs’ thesis. There is definitely, in Marx’s texts, a certain scorn for those who take the romantic point of view about capitalism’s disenchanted world. Marx, with his curious dialectical lucidity, a lucidity that sees the double in sentimental, the sophisticate in the naïve, thus saw through that hopeless rentier nostalgia accompanying the bourgeois point of view – Don Quixote and Sancho Panza reversing roles. But dialectical lucidity is, itself, a strategy, and Marx the outlaw in his own works seems to double back just as you think, posse like, that you are on his trail at last and about to bust into his camp.

So taking Amie’s suggestion, one finds, in the inexhaustible old Kant, a passage about vulgarity – waiting there patiently for the weary hermeneut:

“The general human understanding [der gemeine Menschenverstand], which we can regard simply as healthy (and not cultivated) understanding of petty things that may be expected from those who claim to be human beings, has thus the sickly honor, to be labeled with the name of common sense (sensus communis). Really, it is that we are to understand by the word common [gemein] (not simply in our language, which contains here an ambiguity, but in many others) something like vulgare, which we meet with everywhere, and of which the possession does not imply either merit or privilege.”

Now an offstage voice might say: aren’t we playing a game with the deconstructionist’s usual pack of trick cards, taking our eyes off the serious things that Marx is saying? So I should say that, firstly, the serious call – let’s get serious! – assumes a horizon which I am questioning. Mutiply, as in whose horizon is this, who constructed it, and why should I assume it? Secondly, the vulgarity – the gemein – of the modern emerges from a self-reflective gesture that is inscribed in the text in terms of an economy – in terms used to talk about the political economy: “Sie [the classical attitude] ist Befriedigung auf einem bornierten Standpunkt; während das Moderne unbefriedigt läßt oder wo es in sich befriedigt erscheint, gemein ist.” The Modern is caught in an economic paradox between being unsatisfied, in which case it appears lesser than its predecessor, or being satisfied, in which case it appears “gemein”. This isn’t just an accident, apparently – it is the way the structure of the Modern lays itself out. Striver or vulgarian, failure or prig, this is the neurotic position of the vulgar.

Calasso tells the following story: ‘In December, 1861, the treacherous Saint Beuve advised Baudelaire to write a letter in which he would formally seek nomination to the Academie. It was to be addressed to the current Secretary Perpetual de L’Academie Francaise, Abel Villemain, who by virtue of his position was the perfect embodiment of Baudelaire’s notion of stupidity, or la Sottise (“I have a passion for la Sottise”)…When Baudelaire paid the obligatory call on Vigny, one of the Forty, the latter shook his big aristocratic head. It was a faux pas, he declared, unforgiveable. All too often he had heard his colleagues whisper, “We’ll make that fellow bow and scrape, and then we won’t appoint him.” Meanwhile, he made a mental note: ‘Baudelaire seems of no literary consequence, except as the translator of that philosophical novelist [Poe]. Has the distinguished, suffering look of a studious and diligent man.” But Baudelaire still had to see the enormous Villemain, enormis loquacitas. “The hatred of a mediocre person is always an enormous hatred.” He listened as the man lectured him, “with indescribable solemnity” about Les Paradis artificiels: “La Toxicologie, monsieur, n’est pas la Morale!”… In masterly fashion, Baudelaire transcribed the sentence inserting two harsh capital letters. Ever childish, he said to himself: “I’ll make him pay dearly for this.” They took leave of each other with the following words: “Villemain, insisting, “I have never had the slightest originality, monsieur!” Baudelaire, insinuating, “Monsieur, how would you know?”

Marx and vulgarity, take one

“They ought to take this Kant and give him a three year stretch in Solovki for such proofs! Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly.”

One problem with trying to deal with Marx in a blog, or in the fragment form of my The Human Limit, is that Marx is a whale and LI, by design and ability, through all possible worlds, is a minnow. Thus, my analysis of Marx takes on the appearance of a conjuring act, similar to Houdini’s legendary trick of making an elephant vanish. A trick which may never have happened, and has certainly never been explained to any magician’s complete satisfaction. The minnow shall, in one tremendous bite, eat the whale, ladies and gentlemen. As a proof positive, we will then x ray the minnow, and you will be able to discern the whale’s peculiar skeleton within its sad little stomach.

So then, to return to the rules of this thread, the goal, here, is to shine a light on Marx’s idea of the romantic viewpoint. He puts it in terms of a nostalgia, of sorts, for the universal individual, the complete human, the Goethe, the Leonardo. In conjuring up this ideal, it posits itself, necessarily, as critical of the bourgeois viewpoint – which wears the complete human down to a useable stub, like a number two pencil. The well rounded individual becomes an Andrew Carnegie at best, a sage of money. Yet these two viewpoints, Marx says, are always linked together, always accompany each other. We’ve taken long hard looks at these adventure stories before – these comedies of the sage and buffoon, the Don Juan and the Sganarelle, Bruno’s asinine wisdom and the infinity of worlds. Are these viewpoints, as Marx calls them, transformations in this series, or something new?

That, at least, was one of the questions we wanted to answer – although the rules of the game require that all answers be posed with the fine irony that slips between the true and the believable.

But speaking of vulgarity – wasn’t I speaking of vulgarity? Yes, I believe I was. Well, as I said to Marx that spring in London, I am not at all sure of that sticking universal history into these notebooks in bits and pieces is the way to go about it. But I’m becoming more convinced, as the centuries wear on, that there is a method in the madness – and that method is precisely the finest form of madness, the flower, so to speak, of dementia. There is a minnow in the whale, there is a midget chessmaster in the Turk, there is, if not a theologian, still an alchemist, a treasure seeker, and Catherine the Great’s shaman behind the curtain of dialectical materialism. Or have I gone too far here?

Anyway, here’s a bit I want to deal with next. In his notebooks, Marx is using a vocabulary that he has already tried out in his political writings; this sets up a field between them of conceptual and semiotic turns; in particular, one feels that the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon breaths down the neck of Marx’s universal history in the Grundrisse. As, for instance, here, in which Marx, with the secret arrogance of a man who understands, on one level, the fallen nobility and fierce regret of the reactionary writers (if on another level he pours contempt on their nostalgia for the irrevocable and the consequent imprecision and mystification that envelops the past from which they have been expelled), sussing out the origin of the peculiar vulgarity of the bourgeois lifestyle. Marx, as we have emphasized, borrows Hegel’s dialectic and infuses it with the Wiccan insight that backward is not merely forward subtracted, but an entrance into the Night, that other order:

“Now, wealth is on one side a thing, realized in things, material products, which a human being confronts as subject; on the other side, as value, wealth is merely command over alien labour not with the aim of ruling, but with the aim of private consumption etc. It appears in all forms in the shape of a thing, be it an object or be it a relation mediated through the object, which is external and accidental to the individual. Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics -- and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds -- this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought for. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.”

PS - Rough Theory has put up the first chapter of her reading of Capital. LI, like all readers of Marx, can only echo her introductory remark: "In this chapter, I explore just how difficult it can be to tell when it is safe to read Capital, by reconstructing what I take to be the main narrative arc for the opening chapter. To anticipate and foreshadow the argument I make below: my central interpretive claim is that this narrative arc is surprisingly difficult to find."

Updike RIP

Updike is dead, and now he is being obituarized past all scandals and humors.

This is from Rabbit Redux:

"Take off your clothes here."

The command startles her; her chin dents and her eyes go wide with fright. No reason he should be the only scared person here. Rich bitch calling his living room tacky. Standing on the rug where he and Janice last made love, Jill skins out of her clothes. She kicks off her sandals and strips her dress upward. She is wearing no bra. Her tits tug upward, drop back, give him a headless stare. She is wearing bikini underpants, black lace, in a pattern too fine to read. Not pausing a moment for him to drink her in, she pulls the elastic down with two thumbs, wriggles, and steps out. Where Janice had a springy triangle encroaching on the insides of her thighs when she didn't shave, Jill has scarcely a shadow, amber fuzz dust darkened toward the center to an upright dainty mane. The horns of her pelvis like starved cheekbones. Her belly a child's, childless. Her breasts in some lights as she turns scarcely exist. Being naked elongates her neck: a true ripeness there, in the unhurried curve from base of skull to small of back, and in the legs, which link to the hips with knots of fat and keep a plumpness all the way down. Her ankles are less slim than Janice's. But, hey, she is naked in this room, his room. This really strange creature, too trusting. She bends to pick up her clothes. She treads lightly on his carpet, as if watchful for tacks. She stands an arm's-length from him, her mouth pouting prim, a fleck of dry skin on the lower lip. "And you?"

"Upstairs." He undresses in his bedroom, where he always does; in the bathroom on the other side of the partition, water begins to cry, to sing, to splash. He looks down and has nothing of a hard-on. In the bathroom he finds her bending over to test the temperature mix at the faucet. A tuft between her buttocks. From behind she seems a boy's slim back wedged into the upsidedown valentine of a woman's satin rear. He yearns to touch her, to touch the satin symmetry, and does. It stings his figertips like glass we don't expect is there. Jill doesn't deign to flinch or turn at his touch, testing the water to her satisfaction. His cock stays small but has stopped worrying.”

I love the way the body takes on the action verbs. Not just that the cock stops worrying, there is also the lovely legs keeping a plumpness all the way down, and the curve of the neck that doesn’t hurry as it goes from the base of the skull to the small of the back. The work inside these paragraphs is about the easy, miniscule and multiple detachment of the subject self from its claim to be the master of the verbs, the loss of that standing here, the devolution of all capital power to cock and ass and their tactile sense of time and space as these categories come out of their abstract stupor. This is what made Updike love describing sex. Even Mailer, who shared that passion, is all too ready to let the subject parachute back into the fuck, whence it becomes a demonstration in a theorem. Not so Updike, for whom flesh is flesh all the way through. Of course, he has his ideas about it – sex is always about the war between men and women, and Updike is on the man’s side, and ultimately on God's – but his attitude towards fuck is much like that of Robert E. Lee’s toward the tactics and strategy of battle: It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it. Which is where Presbyterianism lands you in the late 20th century.

a parable from Potocki

Consider this a parable.

Consider, too, that where there are parables, there is wisdom. For the parable is the preferred genre of the wise.

And finally, consider the status of the parable in a world in which the wise have become as extinct as the dodo or the passenger pigeon. Shouldn’t the parable follow?

In 1797, the ever mysterious Jan Potocki set off from Moscow on a journey that would supposedly take him to China. On the 27th of May, he passed from Europe into Asia, although the two continents are not clearly demarcated by any particular geographic feature. At this point, he was in the territory of the Kalmucks. He had become part of this expedition as a scholar, researching the pre-history of the Slavs. He was thus continually reminded of his reading of the ancient historians and geographers, Herodotus and Strabo.

“My dog created a great sensation among them. I was told, in reference to this subject, that they attached to this animal ideas of metempsychosis, and that for this reason they held it a great honor, after their deaths, to be devoured by their dogs, who always in fact did them this honor. For, in spite of the great respect given to them by the Kalmucks, they hardly ever fed them, since they were too miserly with their dairy products to give them any; as for their dead animals, the Kalmucks ate them too, without any fuss. So much was this so that the dogs, when they hadn’t had any Kalmucks to devour, were reduced to living as they could by hunting sousliks. …

A citizen of Sarapta, who had long followed the hordes, told me that it was a horrible spectacle to see the dogs in frenzied attack on a corpse, of which they then left pieces throughout the steppe. Yet all this is quite gentle compared with the Scythian practice of yore. Strabo, speaking of the customs of the Scythian nomads, which were conserved among the Sogdiens and the Bactrians, says: In the capital of the Bactrians dogs were raised up to whom were given a particular name, which, would mean, in our tongue, the undertakers. These dogs are charged with devouring all those who have begun to become feeble, by reason of age and or disease. For this reason, the outskirts of the capital offer no views of any funereal monuments. But inside the walls there are plenty of ossuaries. It is said that Alexander abolished this custom.”

Employment,efficiency and bullshit

LI has been pushed over the edge, a bit, by Matt Yglesias’ link to University of Chicago economist Kevin Murphey’s “best anti-stimulus argument I’ve seen.”

Of course, meritocratic liberals love to be entangled in a discourse full of lambda’s and “model” talk. It is like being a smart sophmore again. The professor’s favorite!

But of course it is all bullshit. Unfortunately, this bullshit is increasingly setting the agenda – that is, it is being answered in its own terms. I’ve seen this happen before – it happened with Clinton’s health plan. We are in a much worse place, but it is worth noting that any conversation with bullshit has to call bullshit correctly, otherwise we go into the Laocoon dimension where liberal pundits flail and weep.

Here’s the truth. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. At the moment, according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans employed by local, state and federal governments.

This means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84 percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of unemployment of 5 percent, the private sector ends up employing closer to 80 percent of the work force.

At the moment, what has happened is that the private sector employs about 78 percent of the work force, as unemployment has gone up. Although government has held steady, no doubt in the next year, there will be layoffs from the government, too, This means that neither the private sector nor government will employ the percentage they do on average since WWII.

I put these figures out there so that one isn’t lulled into a discussion of whether the neo-classical models assume full employment or not. This is a nice, liberal discussion, but it overlooks the more fundamental lie of Murphy, et al., which is the assumption, which is swallowed like the sugar in liquid cough medicine, that the private sector somehow could efficiently employ 100 percent of the work force. It can’t. It has never been able to get past 85 percent in the post war period. There is a limit to the weight it can lift. We know what it is.

So the only argument about the stimulus is this: should the government absorb the extra unemployed or not? That is, should the government grow 3 or 4 percentage points?

The argument against this is not an efficiency argument. That is a stupid argument. The argument is, rather, that somehow, business can absorb the extra unemployed. Which means that the right is saying that, in the next year, the private sector can expand 4 or 5 percentage points to assume its usual standing in the economy.

Do you believe this? Does anybody? No tax break tax cut bullshit should take anybody’s eye off that ball. The question is: how can the private sphere possibly expand to absorb the 4 to 5 percent of the unemployed?

In reality, the right is saying, let the unemployed grow. And underneath that is the notion that if we can actually diminish the salary of the average worker, then businesses will be inclined to hire them. This, without the bullshit, is the righ’s position. The recession is an opportunity for business to gain permanent tax cuts and hire people at reduced rates.

Now, the only way this will actually bring business back up to its traditional 80 percent position is if the pie shrinks.

I foresee that laying out the numbers in a way that everybody can understand them will not happen. Rather, we will have more endless droning about endlessly bogus functions from conservative economists, who will be countered with ever more esoteric models from liberal ones. The point will be to cover up the real situation, so that we will be fogged in, and deprived of the ability to use our own two eyes to see what the situation is, and decide for ourselves what we want done.

Class dismissed. Oh, and watch this economics lecture for an important message.

Ghost dances of the superrich

George Marcus begins his comparison of the world of the Kaluli, in New Guinea, with the world of the rich, in Texas, by making a comment about the binary that has defined the modern project since the enlightenment:

“This paper is an effort to outline a major challenge (as well as opportunity) for a developing ethnography of modernity within anthropology through ironic reference to a traditional anthropological problem in the traditional arena of traditional society.”

Why an ironic reference? Because, since the philosophes, it is through irony that we understand the irrationality of dualisms – or perhaps I should say, their fundamentally conventional nature. The irony, for the philosophe, can both attack the superstitions upon which established power erects itself and, at the same time, distance itself from the rituals and schemas of the folk. When Forster writes about the frozen revolutions that have kept the serfs at an animal level, he is saying, on the one hand, that all non-democratic principalities rest on a crime against human nature, and, on the other hand, that the crime was successfully carried out – that, in fact, the serfs make sense of their world within the limits defined by the masters. This was a common enlightened view. Another German radical of the time, the influential historian August Schlözer, who conducted a passionate campaign against Leibeigenheit – “ownership of bodies”, i.e. serfdom, also concluded that the struggle for liberation had to start at the top. In a fascinating essay on serfdom and honor by David Martin Luebke, Luebke, while conceding that Schlözer burned the connection between slavery and serfdom into the consciousness of enlightened public opinion, claims that he still “underestimate[d] the fundamental role of social perceptions in the formation of early modern popular politics” – that, in other words, Schlözer didn’t see that his conclusion, that triumph of an educated brain, was being made by the serfs themselves. made the connection As Lenin would put it in 1905, a revolutionary party had to be the vanguard of the working class – and not depend on the spontaneous order of liberation dreamt up by the working class itself. The recent upsurge in studies of popular “resistance” – in which resistance quickly becomes an inflated term that applies to Britney videos and Batman movies – is, on the face of it, an attempt to reverse this long tradition. However, it almost always turns out that the ‘resistance” extracted is secondary to the theory applied – with little regard for the semiotic unit itself. Resistance becomes the booty brought home in triumph by the critic, who demonstrates not so much the expression of the ‘people’ as the amazing elasticity of the theorie du jour.

Which is another way of saying, when the people write the text, you can fuck with it any way you want to – including supposing that the people are writing the text.

But what if one supposes that the writers of the text, the managers, the bourgeoisie itself, while pitted against superstition and promoting the making of universal history in every household, are themselves hostages in a ghost dance?

But let’s go back to Marcus. After posing the question in terms of the modern, he returns to the Kaluli, quoting from an anthropologist who did field work among them, Ed. Schieffelin:

“In talking about the people of the other world, the Kaluli use the term mama, which means shadow or reflection. When asked what the people of the unseen look like, Kaluli will point to a reflection in a pool or a mirror and say, "They are not like you or me. They are like that." In the same way, our human appearance stands as a reflection to them. This is not a "supernatural" world, for to the Kaluli, it is perfectly natural. Neither is it a "sacred world," for it is virtually coextensive with and exactly like the world the Kaluli inhabit, subject to the same forces of mortality .... In the unseen world, every man has a reflection in the form of a wild pig . . . that roams invisibly on the slopes of Mt. Bosavi. The man and his wild pig reflection live separate existences, but if something should happen to the wild pig, the man is also affected. If it is caught in a trap, he is disabled; if it is killed by hunters of the unseen, he dies. [1976:96-97]”

I’m sure Infinite Thought would be intrigued by the wild pig reflection. She always knew it!

About the Kaluli, Marcus makes a very interesting remark:

Phenomenologically, this unseen world is experienced through an aesthetic of sounds and sounding, as Steve Feld (1982) has re- counted. In the richly diverse sounds of the forest, the unseen world is always present for the Kaluli. What happens is always here and there, never being fully present. In this sense, the Kaluli would be Derrida's own model of Rousseau's primitive who defies logocen- trism: they live largely without the Western metaphysics of pres- ence, and thus represent the antithesis of the desire for self-suffi- ciency, for the unqualified and the unmediated. Yet, while known by the Kaluli in everyday life in an episodic, commonsensical, and fragmented way, the unseen world is systematically imagined in rit- ual (the Gisaro) and discourse through mediums who, roughly like an ethnographer, have been to this other world and have seen what ordinary persons can only hear traces of. Communication with the unseen world and authoritative interpretations of events in the here and now world of the Kaluli thus depend on the coherent vision of mediums, who at certain moments give presence and order to Kaluli culture by creating primarily visualized representations (rather than sounded evocations) of the unseen world within the fully sensed world of the here and now. (Marcus, 1989, 115)

The shadow world – it is such a natural term. We talk about the ‘shadow financial system” in the same way – as a wholly natural entity, with rather fantastic attributes. Having a superstitious belief that numbers are a power, we are all duly impressed that the shadow amount of derivatives in the world is 500 trillion dollars. And of course, if this amouth is caught in a trap, we are disabled: if it is killed on the OTC range, we die. Or so we have been told.

Marcus uses Schieffelin’s language for his own project. He has been doing field study in Texas, among the wealthy. Just as the Kaluli world gets on quite well with the infinite deferral of presence, and depends on a “discourse through mediums who, roughly like an ethnographer, have been to this other world and have seen what ordinary persons can only hear traces of,” so, too, the Texas wealthy have something out there called their “wealth”, a brother/sister shadow wild pig, with which they must communicate in some way. It is impossible for LI to resist quoting the ever mad Ben Stein’s column in today’s NYT in relation to these mediums:

NOT long ago, a woman in California called me for advice. She is divorced, with two children, and has a series of interlocking financial problems.

She lives in a lovely home in a stylish inland enclave. It has an interest-only mortgage of about $2.2 million that requires a payment of $12,000 a month, very roughly. It was last appraised at $2.7 million, but who knows if it’s now worth anything remotely close to that price.
The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.
She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.
What could I say? I did the best I could, but I had to tell her that she was on very thin ice.”

Cut away to Marcus:

“The ethnographic treatment of the Kaluli thus brings me to the very edge of a methodological and theoretical problem in the prac- tice of ethnography in societies of self-styled modernity and progress, to which I now want to turn. Unseen doppelganger worlds, the equivalents of that of the Kaluli, are equally as consequential for groups of ethnographic subjects in modern societies, yet they really are unproblematically capable of conventional definition and em- pirical investigation. What becomes of the focused, local order of culture in ethnographic research when it is understood in terms, like the Kalulis', of at least dual, spatially distanced, complexly con- nected, and mutually determined simultaneous worlds? Does the ethnographer remain, as he is obliged to do among the Kaluli, with here and now accounts of these worlds, or does he move to grasp them empirically and, in so doing, to reconfigure the fundamental ground upon which ethnographic narratives and representations of cultural order have traditionally been made? How does the ethnog- rapher in his/her own academic culture, rather than the Kaluli in their here and now world, handle a subject that is never definitively or self-sufficiently present anywhere, but is continually and partially constructed in parallel, simultaneous, but separate contexts?3 Such is a subject like the contemporary dynastic rich, among other late 20th-century Americans. The dynastic fortunes that I have studied in Texas over the past few years are complex creations of various kinds of experts and of lineages of descendants two to four generations away from founding entrepreneurial ancestors. A dynasty is commonsensically a family, but after much experience with this form of social organization, I find that it is primarily a fortune instead. Concentrations of old wealth, however, have no one particular locus or materialization; in short, they have no presence. Rather, a fortune has multiple, simultaneous manifestations within a variety of interconnected but isolated social contexts that encompass the long-term fates and daily lives of literally hundreds of people. In initiating my research, I followed common sense and took the family-literal flesh-and-blood descendants, and particularly those who seemed to be leaders or in positions of authority-for the dynasty. I soon discovered in their here and now lives the profound influence of the equivalent of the unseen world among the Kaluli-the complex world of highly spec- ialized expertise that through an elaborate division of labor, not only structured the wealth but, also, created doppelganger facsimiles of the descendants-roughly similar to the Mt. Bosavi wild pig reflec- tions of Kaluli persons-variously constituted as clients, benefici- aries of trusts, wealth shares in computerized strategies of invest- ment, and accountants' files. While the unseen world is richly reg- istered through sound and imagery in the here and now of the Kaluli, it distinctly is not among the descendants within dynastic families. Being true to the metaphysics of presence that shapes their individualism, they always presume that they are self-sufficiently in control of their lives, while being vaguely aware, more so than other Americans probably, that they are constantly being moved about and determined as bearers of wealth and credit in worlds of money and finance.”

The poetry of quotations overwhelms LI. Excuse me for a minute while I get my handkerchief – tears of sorrow and tears of laughter are leaking from my eyes. In the meantime, you can listen to this.