false consciousness - real happiness

Note 1: I think I can trace the career of the concept of false consciousness across the Other sciences, across literature, across the adventures of all of my alienated marginals (for yes, instead of a ‘career’, they lead, or are led by, an adventure, even if they never leave home at all). For liberals, false consciousness is the disturbing power of projection; for radicals, it is the inverse image of what is really happening in capitalism, as commodity exchange sinks deeper and deeper into all personal relationships; and for the reactionaries, it is original sin, which finds, in the non-Christian, the undertakers of Christendom – the decadents, the positivists, the Jews, the homosexuals, the half breeds. Although, in truth, false consciousness, as original sin, is a feature of man’s very nature – and in that sense it is false to call it false. Rather, it is consciousness itself which is permeated with sin.

Yet, the liberals and the radicals felt there was a limit somewhere. Their alienation from the happiness culture represented, or rather, was represented as a stance for true happiness. And so we have another duality, perhaps derived from the notion of false consciousness. One that is less codified. For the most part, the alienated did not feel that happiness itself, as a social phenomenon, could be questioned. Rather, happiness has the wrong objects. Why? Because of social and cultural conditions. To dissolve those conditions, which are always disguised in false consciousness, is to take the first step to real happiness.

Note two. I am sick, the summer is boiling, and for a long time I’ve wanted to write about Herzen. I’ll start with the following:

L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Rousseau’s famous phrase imposed a kind of shibboleth on intellectuals in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – before the revolution, the phrase is read with an emphasis on the imposition of those chains, for surely someone or something has shackled man; indisputably, those chains were forged and affixed by some institution, or perhaps even by many. And if this is so, if this injustice has been enacted everywhere, everywhere one has the duty to strike them off.

But after the revolution, in the wake of the reaction that succeeded Napoleon’s fall, the focus. If man is everywhere in chains, this is a statement not about what has been done to man, but about what man has preferred. Such gloomy thoughts came to William Hazlitt. And, after 1848, they were expressed by one of Herzen’s characters, a doctor, in a dialogue between him and his companion, a woman of the Left, in From the Other Shore. The doctor claims that Rousseau’s phrase is “famous nonsense”:

“Can you repeat with irony this cry of indignation wrung from a free man?”
“To me, it is a coercion of history, contempt for the facts, and I find it unbearable: I am hurt by the arbitrariness of it. Added to this, there is the obnoxious method of deciding in advance just what the crux of the matter is. What would you say to a man who, shaking his head, would make the melancholy observation that fish are born to fly and yet are constantly under water?”
“I would ask him why he believed that fish were born to fly.”
“You are becoming more exacting. But a true friend of fishkind would find a ready answer. In the first place he would tell you that the skeletons of fish incontrovertibly show the tendency of limbs to develop into legs or wings; he will point to an array of quite superfluous bones which suggest the rudimentary bones of feet and wings; finally, he will cite the flying fish which demonstrate in practice that fishkind not only strives to fly, but sometimes actually does so. Having made this requisite reply, he will be justified to ask why you do not demand an explanation from Rousseau who says that man is born to be free on the grounds that he is constantly in chains. Why do all things exist as they should exist, while man alone does not?” (I'm using the translation that is contained in Selected works. With a preface by Lenin! Check it out at Archive.org.)

Herzen’s doctor is a premonition of Nietzsche, or of those characters in Ibsen who defy the masses. A new theme, a new form of liberalism, one alienated from the banalities of positivism, is born on the other shore. It is, however, easy to lose track of this sensibility if we simply accept the easy oppositions of universal history. I’ve been treating Hoffmann’s tale as a way of opening us up to the versions of universal history that can be projected

what is false consciousness?

We all know that false consciousness can be manufactured by the yard, like ribbon. We have merely to pick up a newspaper or see a movie to confirm this belief. In fact, the most popular story about false consciousness, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’ New Clothes, uses thread as the emblem of false consciousness – for in its essence, false consciousness is that nothing at all for which someone gets paid. And haven’t we seen them sewing the invisible thread? What was Tarp, what was the Iraq war, but the work of the tailors? Who wove justifications through which it was quite easy to see – it was quite easy to see that Iraq, a country that had been crippled by ten years of sanctions, couldn’t even properly attack its breakaway Northern half, much less threaten a power that spends more on the military each year than the rest of the world spends in five years. Just as it was quite easy to see that the middle and working class, hit by a business cycle that had been put in motion by the financial sector, were going to pay the people, pay them richly, who had caused the disaster, all in the name of an essential function that they had not performed in years, and have no plans to perform in the future: moving capital into venues productive of the social good.

The problem is that false consciousness implies true consciousness, but who manufactures the later? Or are we to assume that it isn’t manufactured at all? The Anderson tale indicates this problem as well, in its own terms. In the second paragraph of the story we read:

“In the great city where he [the Emperor] lived, life was always gay. Every day many strangers came to town, and among them one day came two swindlers. They let it be known they were weavers, and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid. “

The term “swindlers” is the tell. True consciousness has already been woven into the cloth of the story – we, the reader and the author, have a wonderful way of seeing the tailors for swindlers, and the empty looms for empty looms. Thus, when the little boy proclaims that the emperor is naked, he is saying something that we already knew.

“Small Zaches” has never achieved the popularity of the Emperor’s New Clothes, but it, too, is concerned with political and social delusion. And it, too, is centered around – pinned by – an unjustified fact – that Zinnober is Small Zaches, a dwarfish snarling stupid creature, a changeling. The very shift of name, which is unexplained, indicates a social doubleness. The humor in the story is, in essence, bound up with the way scenes are juxtaposed. Zinnober is introduced to the Furst, but merely mumbles and growls at him while smearing food over himself. The Furst, oblivious, congratulates the little monster on a memo he has received. A courtier comes forward and claims that he has written the memo – and we know from the author's clues that the courtier is telling the truth - in as much as there is truth in this world. But the Furst gets angry at him, not only for what the Furst believes is his false claim to authorship, but, as well, for eating like a pig, smearing food on himself, and dropping a piece of melted butter on the Furst’s uniform. Like children, we laugh at this – or at least I laugh at this – because we know that the Furst has transposed a true version of events, the one told to us by the author, to a false version, projected unconsciously by Zinnober. It is a stroke of true psychological insight to make Zinnober less the creator of these projections than the beneficiary of them. Meanwhile, we know what is what because we have an author and a story - an absolute grounding under the ambivalence of the versions. He, at least – this anonymous, organizing voice – has a true consciousness of the events that are unfolding in the tale. This is, after all, the terms of the "contract' between the author and the reader.

Yet , later on, in the sixth chapter, this same author calmly describes magical metamorphoses in the coffee time between Rosavelde and Dr. Prosper Alpanu. There, the truth is, in contrast with the breakfast with Zinnober and the Furst, full of fantastic things, things out of the order of our normal sense of sublunar causality, and yet there is no break in the authorial voice, no sense that here, we have gone off the rails. Rather, we have a sense that all is in order because, outside of the Enlighenment, the order can easily acommodate such "table tricks." Meanwhile, in one of those strokes of mad genius in which Hoffmann seems to rise above the merely satiric or folkloric, even Zinnober’s most ardent defender, the advocate of enlightenment, and the man whose daughter wants to marry him, Professor Mosch Terpin, experiences moments when his eyes deceive him – that is, moments when he sees clearly: “ It is true that it often seems inconceivable even to me that a girl like Candida could be so foolishly fond (vernarrt sein) of the little man. Otherwise, women mostly are looking for a handsome exterior, than for particular intellectual gifts, and when I look at the special little man for a while, it begins to seem to me as if he were not at all pretty, but even a humpy… st …. St…be still, the walls have ears. He is the favorite of the Furst, always climbing higher. Higher, and he is my future son-in-law.”

At the other end, Zinnober's enemy, Balthasar, experiences the exact opposite. It is Balthasar, who makes the most uncanny confession. Balthasar is one of our anchoring characters, whose perspective, vis a vis the truth about the special little man, is the author’s own. He hates the special small man precisely because Candida loves him (and it is here that Balthasar and the author part ways, so to speak – Balthasar’s love for Candida, it is made abundantly clear, is itself based on a fundamental delusion). But there he is, sitting in the forest (which represents the anti-entlightenment by its very existence – and yet also represents the place where projection is neutralized) at the beginning of chapter four, making a confession:

No, he cried out as he sprang from his perch and with glowing glances looked into the distance, “no, all hope has not yet vanished! – it is only too certain that some dark secret, some evil magic has broken into my life, but I will break this magic, even if it kills me! – as I finally fled, overcome by the feeling that my breast would explode unless I confessed my love to gracious, sweet Candida, didn’t I read in her look, feel by the press of her hand, my blessedness? But when that damned mishmash was seen, it was to him that all the love flowed. On you, execrable misbirth, hung Candida’s eyes, and longing sighs flew from her breast, when the clumsy boy came near her or touched her hand. … Isn’t it fantastic, that everyone mocks and laughs at the completely helpless, misshapen little man, and then again, when the small man slips in between, cry him up as the most intelligent, learned, even handsome Studioso among us? – What am I saying? Doesn’t it come over me in the same way, as if Zinnobar were clever and pretty? Only in Candida’s presence does the magic have no power over me: then is and remains Mr. Zinnober a dumb, dreadful mandrake!”

Who does not feel these terrible moments of surrender? And must projection drive out projection and so on, without end?

doppelgangers in their cradles

There has been a story in the Western cultures about the Other cultures that has developed over a long, long time – one of the great traditions. In this story, the history of the people without history, the savages, is modeled on an equivalence between the savage’s world view and the child’s. Like the child, the savage naturally and incorrectly projects anthropomorphic characteristics on things, animals, and events. Animism, in this story, arrives as the first stage of our development in our cognitive schedule. The first attitude towards the world sees it as alive. Just as Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, children recapitulate the beliefs of savages, who express the cognitive development of children. In that circle we see expressed the natural, intuitive notions of man.

Piaget reaffirmed this idea, in the twenties, claiming that children go through a period of “animism” – a period in which all things are living, and human intentionality is projected on non-human entities. But starting in the seventies, a set of researchers in childhood development began to disagree.

Pascal Boyer, in his 1996 essay, What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations, summarizes the research on what he calls childhood ontologies to emphasize the following claim:… “there is no such thing as a categorical ‘confusion; or spontaneous over-extension in the child’s ontology. Live things are not artifacts, persons and plants are not the same, events and abstract objects are different. The child applies to ontological categories a set of particular quasi-theoretical principles which do not result in category mistakes.”

By category mistakes he means that children know the difference between simply false statements – grass is red – and false statements that falsify the category in which a thing is – “rocks get indigestion.” Boyer is, I think, over-emphasizing the decisiveness of this research, and even among the researchers who have dethroned Piaget’s developmental animism, there is some dispute about how the child packs, for instance, the idea of continuity into the idea of person (for instance, some researchers have claimed to find that children at four think that they will be literally different people when they grow up).

But the import of this research is to make animism a matter of institutions. It is an adult response to nature, and not an instinctive response. It is, as Boyer says, counter-intuitive. Boyer makes a case that its spread in primitive cultures is due to its counter-intuitiveness – it is attention grabbing. I don’t really know what to make of this argument, since it seems more about the ways in which animism could spread rather than why it arises in the first place. Boyer, hearteningly, is very much into the notion of projection – although he is careful not to quote Freud, which won’t do in the Anglosphere.

Hoffmann’s story knows this story. Or knows something about it.

But before I go back into Little Zaches, I want to contact the thread that I wrote about Les mots et les choses. Little Zaches is published during the threshold period of modernity, that period in which, according to Foucault, Man was born – and according to LI’s backwards reading of Foucault, the Other was born.

“I’ve been thinking about why it is that the l’age classique I’ve been presenting seems, on the surface, to reverse everything in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses. I don’t see that reversal as a contradiction, but a turning inside out – just as you can turn a coat or a shirt inside out. Of course, turning inside out doesn’t have a proper place in logic, or a name in dialectics, but it does in the theory of play – ilinx. And where I have grabbed Foucault’ narrative and turned it inside out is, I think, just at that place where he announces the birth of man and his coming disappearance. For, in my endless bedtime story, the end of the eighteenth century, the laying down of the foundations of the culture of happiness, is about another birth, which by Swedenborgian bilocation might be the same birth: the birth of the Other. To my mind, this is what was busy being born as the guillotine came down on the Ancien Regime.”

It is the Other that forms the locus of interest for the human sciences of the modern era. And the Other to which the alienated marginals, dissidents in the happiness culture, turn as well. The duo of Other and Man is, naturally, a doppelgaenger special, a routine, a horror story and vaudeville. And so we return you to…

happy doppelganger 2

In brief, the story of Little Zaches, aka Zinnobar (Klein Zaches, sogenannte Zinnobar) concerns the fate of a dwarf (knirps), who is found one day lying on the ground next to his exhausted mother by an abbess, Rosengrünschön, who has magical powers. Her magical powers have led to her persecution – she is a fairy – and hence to her taking refuge in a vaguely described religious “house”. Zaches is described as a mute, misbegotten child, a changeling. In fact, when we first come upon him, lying in the sack of sticks that his mother has collected from the forest, the author notes that he could be mistaken for a log. Physically and mentally subpar, Zaches, in this story, rises to be the minister of the country, under the name Zinnobar. It is, then, a political fairy tale – but it is also a bit of twisted universal history.

It is under the guise of universal history that logs, sticks and trees play their part. Freud, as we have pointed out, claimed that the psychic process of projection was the source of animism. Hoffmann’s story inverses that insight: projection is, it turns out, the central force in the politics of Enlightenment. In this way, Hoffmann carries through on the kind of project that Angela Carter took up: to understand the kind of politics that takes hold in a war of projections and counterprojections in the midst of a fairy tale landscape.

The key to the little dwarf’s power is his golden hairs. Combed a certain way by Rosengrünschön, he becomes a magnet of projection – any noble, beautiful or elegant act performed by someone in his physical proximity is attributed to him. This is, in a sense, animism squared, or “potentiated”, as Schelling might put it.

Rosengrünschön herself holds “loud conversations with wonderful voices that seem to come out of the trees, out of the bushes, out of the springs and streams.” Hoffmann gives the small duchy in which the story is set a history that satirically encodes the history of Europe: Rosengrünschön and others of her type – fairies – were protected in the land by Count Demetrius. The little principality is very much a paradise: “Surrounded by a high chain of mountains, the little country with its green, smoky forests, with its blooming pastures, with its foaming steams and pleasantly bubbling springs, at the same time that it contained no cities, but only friendly villages and here and there a single castles, was like a wonderfully glorious garden, in which the inhabitants wandered at their pleasure, free from any of the pressing burdens of life.”

When Demetrius dies, the principality undergoes a sort of revolution, instituted by his son and successor, Paphnutius. Paphnutius sees the wandering free inhabitants as, in fact, horribly neglected. Hoffmann remarks that the people scarcely knew they were governed under Demetrius. This, in Paphnutius’s view, is pure misgovernment. And the symbol of that misgovernment is the failure to use the resources of the land. Thus, Paphnutius first thought is to make up big posters and placard the village streets with the announcement that, from now on, the Enlightenment would be breaking out in his lands. But Andres, an advisor, warns him that this would not do – rather, the stage had to be set by banning the fairies. After that, Enlightenment would find no resistance. And what is Enlightenment? Andres’ answer is much more down to earth than Kant’s: “chopping down the woods, making the stream navigable, cultivating potatoes, improving the village schools, planting acacias and poplars, making the youth recite their doubletoned morning and evening song, laying down sidewalks, and inoculating the cowpox.”

A catalog that could be taken from the history of Prussia under Frederick the Great and Austria under Joseph II.

Andres program was initiated. The fairies fled, or became vagabonds. Only Demetrius’ favorite, Rosengrünschön, was allowed to stay, in an abbey. Given this history, the irresistible rise of Zaches could be seen as a revenge; the return of the repressed.

boredom (crossposting at Newsfromthezona)

When I look back on my life and try to understand why it has been such a failure, the key, I think, is in my inability to endure boredom. Or perhaps I should say my inability to endure boredom for the sake of making money. In this, I am spiritually one with the street people, the addicts, the semi-professional criminals – with all of those who never quite grew up, whose immaturity is caught in their throat. The difference is that, among the decayed Peter Pan gang, there is – as you will find out very quickly if you talk to them - an astonishing nostalgia for the larva days – high school pranks, days of honey in the suburban hive. I hate that shit, which bored me at the time, and bores me in memory still.

And yet, at the same time, I am enmeshed in activities that may seem, and probably are, boring to most of workaday America. And, to add to the problem of being bored in America, I find the culture of entertainment that has been foisted upon that workaday world – and eagerly adopted – to be, if not completely boring, at least boring enough that I know little about it. The TV, the pop movies, the celebrity culture – I can’t keep up because I can’t concentrate, I can’t remember what it is all about. And I can’t remember because I am not moved by it.

Which makes me want to start over again and ask whether my failure, here, is not so much that I fly from boredom, as that I am bored at the wrong time and by the wrong things. Add to this another confusion: although sometimes I will say, like anybody else, that such and such a thing is boring – and mean, like anybody else, that it is contemptible, that I would like to step on it, shit on it, spit on it, expel it – at other times I despise this kind of language. Boredom, I think – at these other times – is a kind of test, an exercise. It has a necessity, especially in relation to the ecstatic, the sublime, the interesting. To fly boredom in these cases is to fly the depths. To be unable to be bored is to be unable to be. All of which ties me into knots.

Kierkegaard, in the Concept of Dread (or Anguish), has a lot to say about boredom. In the fourth chapter, Kierkegaard asks what happened to the demons. Why do Christians no longer talk about the demons in 19th century Europe? Are they ashamed?

This is the starting point for Kierkegaard’s discussion of the demonic. He makes a two-fold approach to the demonic. One approach is to see it in terms of communication. Communication, for Kierkegaard, is ultimately about revelation, and revelation is ultimately about the divine. Every act of true revelation is divine. And revelation is at the heart of communication. Thus, every act of non-revelation is on the side of the devil, the ‘spirit of negation’. The demon is, ultimately, non-communicative – on the ethical level. In the German translation I take this from, the word is Verschlossene. However, what is the content of revelation, or communication? What is affirmed? The affirmed is, ultimately, the continuous. Continuity itself. The devil’s part, then, is the sudden – the Plotzlich, that which puts itself in opposition to the continuous.

Here we have to engage in some dialectical shenanigans, because if the divinely continuous is really to be continuous, it must contain the sudden. Revelation, after all, has its own suddenness. This gets us to boredom. Boredom is, Kierkegaard maintains, incommunicable – it expresses nothing. This is because its content is the Inhalflos – the content-less. The content of boredom is no content.

This polarity between the sudden and the continuous explains the boring core of entertainment, which relies on the sudden as its structuring principle. Myself, possessed by the l’wa of boredom, long for a continuum of suddenness – for the ultimate miracle, for nothing to become something.

Here’s a bit from K. I’m translating, remember, from the German.

“The demonic is the content-less, the boring. Since I have permitted myself to direct attention to the aesthetic problem by the mention of the sudden, in as much as evil lets itself be represented, I will now once more take up this question in order to explain what I’ve been saying. As soon as one gives speech to the demon and wants to represent him, the artist who is supposed to solve such a problem must be clear about his categories. He knows, that the demonic is essentially mimic; he cannot thus achieve the sudden, then this blocks the dialogic. Like a blunderer, he won’t try to pull off an effect by beating out many words, etc. – as if that gave us a true effect! He thus chooses correctly just the opposite, boredom. To the sudden there corresponds a kind of continuity as well, the immortality of boredom, a continuity in nothingness. .. Freedom takes its rest in continuity; the sudden figures not only the opposite, but as well the opposite of the “rest”, of which a person can give us a good impression who seems as if he were long dead and buried.”

The dead and buried person is the person, to my mind, who is selling his or her boredom for money. And using that money to buy plenty of nothing – suddenness in all its multiple forms and varieties. Myself, I am, of course, bored in the culture of the bored, but I fail to find my boredom, lightly transformed into action, entertaining.

the happy doppelganger 1

-- “What I have so often seen in dreams has been fulfilled to me – in the most fearful manner – crippled and ripped apart men.” Such was the entry in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s notebook about the 29th of August, 1813, when he ventured out of Dresden and toured the recent battlefield, upon which Napoleon had inflicted a defeat upon the Alliance. Napoleon’s victory didn’t save him - and it came at the loss of about 30,000 soldiers on both sides. Hoffmann, walking in a Dresden street on the morning of the battle, was nearly killed by a grenade.

“So often seen in dreams.” Hoffmann’s 19th century biographers remarked that their subject wildly claimed to see spirits and doubles outside of dreams. Our information comes from Hitzig, the curiously contemptuous first collector of Hoffmann’s papers. Georg Ellinger, later, saw Hoffmann’s statements as being the overflow of his spirit. His claims, Ellinger thinks, should be interpreted poetically, as metaphors. Although it is true that the short man, whose family in Konigsberg breathed upon him the noxious fumes of imbecility, was a rather peculiar character.

- We started this long thread with Freud’s notion of Projection because Freud makes the claim that it Projection that helps us understand animism. It exists, as it were, in the collective primitive imagination as a psychic machine that produces animism. This is an extraordinary claim. Freud wrote about Hoffmann’s The Sandman in his essay on the uncanny, but I want to examine another Hoffmann tale, “Small Zach, aka Zinnobar” because it involves not only a sort of convergence of projection and mental ventriloquism, but it also contains a story about animism and the enlightenment. I have not found commentary linking this story to Freud’s theory – and yet, I find it fascinating, for it seems to displace the moment of projection, both historically and psychologically, so that what is projected is, (a) literally, triangulated - that is, projection is literally materialized and made into a motif of fantasy, and (b) put in the service of enlightenment. Enlightenment, which chops down the forest, rids the land of fairies, and sees that a tree is a tree and a person a person. Enlightenment might be thought of as the anti-projective ideology – the ideology that gets behind superstition and discovers projection at the base of it.

It is from the viewpoint of a dream that I am thinking of the topic of animism and the enlightenment. The dream of Carpenter Shih in the Chuangtzu, which I have quoted once – and quote here, again:

“After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, "What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs - as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves - the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it's the same way with all other things.
"As for me, I've been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I've finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What's the point of this - things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die-how do you know I'm a worthless tree?"

the dead

“The projection of one’s own evil reactions into the demons is only a piece of a system, which became the ‘weltanschauung’ of primitives and that we, in the next chapter, will meet as the ‘animistic’. We will then have fixed in place the psychological character of such a system-construction and find our point d’appui again in those system-constructions that the neurotics bring to us. Provisionally we will only betray here, that the socalled “secondary elaboration” of the dream content is the model for all these system-constructions. “

(“Die Projektion der eigenen bösen Regungen in die Dämonen ist nur ein Stück eines Systems, welches die »Weltanschauung« der Primitiven geworden ist und das wir in der nächsten Abhandlung dieser Reihe
als das »animistische« kennenlernen werden. Wir werden dann die psychologischen Charaktere einer solchen Systembildung festzustellen haben und unsere Anhaltspunkte wiederum in der Analyse jener Systembildungen finden, welche uns die Neurosen entgegenbringen. Wir wollen vorläufig nur verraten, daß die sogenannte »sekundäre Bearbeitung« des Trauminhalts das Vorbild für alle diese Systembildungen ist.” – TT, 116)

“The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?” – Tom Paine, the Rights of Man

The dead belong not just to you and me – they are the dead of an order. In fact, there is not, and there cannot be, a rule by which one determines whether I belong to the dead or the dead belong to me. I’ve been looking at one aspect of the fall of the old order – a fall that was the great event in universal history, and is certainly at the center of the story I am telling, of the dissolution of the human limit. It governs my story in the same way Finnegan’s fall reigns over Finnegans Wake’s dreamtime. I’ve been writing about projection because, in Freudian terms, it is the mechanism that drives the “building of systems” – it stands at the beginning of poetry and history.

I’m going to move this thread away from its invisible center - which has been the Marriage of Figaro – to a post-revolutionary story of projection – E.T.A. Hoffman’s story, Kleines Zaches, sogenannte Zinnobar.

saint max brod

The line I've been pursuing is that of understanding projection, of seeing, as Freud writes, how that projection gives us an immage of the dead, and - of our being bound to the dead. The codes of the dead. The books of the dead. The books compiled to honor the dead. The honor due to the dead in the disposition of what they leave behind.

Franz Steiner's book, Taboo (1952), for instance - a great instance, with that catcher's mitt poetry of coincidence - was put together in his honor, after his death, by his students, who saw that in his lifetime, he ... dispersed himself over too many areas. Fled from too many policemen. It is, the book is, according to his student, Mary Douglas, an essential text on taboo.

Steiner runs the word down to its first appearance in a European context is in the Journals of Captain Cook. There's something odd about that, Steiner thinks. After all, Cook is reporting a word, in the 1770s, that must have been known to explorers, to seamen, Dutch and Spanish, a century before that. Yet the word doesn't appear in Spanish texts, or Dutch.

Cook uses it first in connection with the sanctions concerning the dead.

“In connection with human sacrifice in Tahiti, we are told:
“The solemnity itself is called Poore Eree, or Chief’s Prayer; and the victim, who is offered up, Tataa-taboo, or consecrated man. This is the only instance where we have heard the word taboo used at this island, where it seems to have the same mysterious significance as at Tonga; though it is there applied to all cases where things are not to be touched.”

Of course, our notion of the discovery of Tahiti is filled with women who can be touched. The isle of Venus. However, as Steiner points out, Cook’s description of the women is as much about these mysterious meanings as it is about availability. Especially, Cook and his men were puzzled by eating arrangements among the Tahitians. In his journal, Cook doesn’t explicitly use the word taboo in this connection, but he gropes around for a word to describe the principles that seem to make it the case that women and men did not eat together. The most famous image from those voyages to Tahiti are, of course, of available naked women – and yet what struck Cook, as much, was their oddly stubborn refusal to eat the same table as men. The british sailors would invite them to do it – and they would always refuse. And they were adamant.

We bump up against the invisible…

Steiner came from a Prague that - when he was writing in 1950 - was as dead and gone as Cook's Tahiti. Back in the day, he knew Max Brod. And that is the man that this post is really about. The man who bumped up against the invisible. The man whose whole whole career proceeded under the mark of a taboo that nobody wanted to speak of. Let’s put Captain Cook back in the frame – put the picture of him, perhaps, on the wall. An adventure story, such as those loved by Brod’s best friend, Franz Kafka.

Brod is most famous not for anything he himself wrote, but for publishing his friend Kafka’s writing – as much as he could find. And yet, he did this in spite of finding this letter among his friend’s affects in that tragic week in 1924, when Kafka died of his tuberculosis:

Liebster Max, meine letzte Bitte: Alles, was sich in meinem Nachlass (also im Buchkasten, Wäscheschrank, Schreibtisch, zu Hause und im Büro, oder wohin sonstirgendetwas vertragen worden sein sollte und dir auffällt) an Tagebüchern, Manuskripten, Briefen, fremden und eignen, Gezeichnetem und so weiter findet, restlos und ungelesen zu verbrennen, ebenso alles Geschriebene oder Gezeichnete, das du oder andre, die du in meinem Namen darum bitten sollst, haben. Briefe, die man dir nicht übergeben will, soll man wenigstens selbst zu verbrennen sich verpflichten.

(Dearest Max, my last request: everything that can be found in my posthumous papers (thus in boxes, cupboards, desks, at home and in the offie, or wherever else they may be that you come upon them) of diaries, manuscripts, letters, my own and those written to me, sketches and so on, should be burned unread and without remnant, even all the written or drawn things that you or others have, that you might have asked for in my name. If there are letters that people will not turn over to you, at least they should promise to burn them themselves.”)

…

By now, there is a quite a literature about Brod and Kafka. It is, to say the least, interesting. On the one hand, what Brod reports about Kafka from direct experience is often quoted as a sort of oral testament of Kafka’s, a Gnostic gospel. On the other hand, Brod’s editing of Kafka’s manuscripts has been attacked, his heavily religious interpretations of Kafka’s work has been ridiculed as something like kitsch by people like Walter Benjamin, his attempts to make Kafka seem like a saint by, for instance, censoring evidence of Kafka going to a brothel has been exposed – and then there is the case of the letter. The contract, the curious pact. Milan Kundera used it as an archetypal symbol of the invasion of the individual’s privacy in Testaments Betrayed. In Rolf Tiedman’s essay on Kafka and shame, he summarizes Kundera’s case like this:

“Because Brod had published "everything, indiscriminately," Kundera charges him with unforgivable indiscretions, with treason against Kafka, for having published "even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod, anyone but its addressee could eventually read.... He betrayed his friend. He acted against his friend's wishes, against the meaning and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew in the man."6 It goes without saying that Kundera cannot sustain this accusation; he has to resort to the supporting construction of a divi- sion between autobiographical material including diaries and letters, on the one hand, and novels and stories, on the other, a construc- tion that seems almost Jesuitical in comparison with the rest of his argument and that is useless for Kafka's work: "With regard to the unfinished prose, I readily concede that it would put any executor in a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varying significance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greater than these."' Kundera would not want to do without Kafka's novels, since he wished to have written them himself; rather-although he never says so directly-he would forego the publication of incom- plete writings of "varying significance" like the texts of the volumes Brod titled Preparations for a Country Wedding and Description of a Struggle." The publication of Kafka's diaries and letters, as Kundera charges vehemently, demonstrated a lack of shame and, in Kun- dera's view, is a capital crime.”

Although Tiedman modifies Kundera’s case, generally, he takes it that, in this contract, this pact, Kafka was the one so easily shamed, Kafka was the one who was shamed, Kafka is like the Josef K at the end of the Trial, who felt, under the executioner’s knife, as if ‘the shame would outlive him” – which Tiedman, taking his clue from Adorno, interprets, literally, as a shame that is ingested by the bystanders, in them, transmitted by them. That they allowed Josef K to be executed…

This story has, however, a funny twist, in that it makes Kafka into a sort of gull. A victim. Devil’s pacts, however, are more… ambivalent than that. I’m interested in what Kafka was doing.

If we take Brod at his word, Kafka left that letter already knowing that Brod would refused to do as instructed. Brod had told Kafka this two years before, when Kafka first showed him the letter. And what funny instructions! If Kafka thought so badly of his botched work, why would he want it hunted down so ardently? It is as if it had a burning importance – an importance to be burnt. Brod was to find letters Kafka wrote – no mean task – and have them burnt. He was to go through everything, a regular anti-treasure hunt. The letter is written in the obsessive rhythm of the animal in the burrow, inventorying his endless defenses against his enemies.

But that’s not all. To my mind the letter’s logical form is closest to the parable, Before the Law, which the sacristan tells Joseph K. in The Trial. In that story, the man outside the law is compelled in a law-like way to wait for being permitted entrance into the law. It is as if he has somehow wandered out of any recognizable social space. Every reader of the novel remembers the chilling end of that parable, the conversation between the man who guards the door to the law and the man who is waiting, and is dying there after all those years:

'What is it you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'You're insatiable.' 'Everyone wants
access to the law,' says the man, 'how come, over all these years, noone but me has asked to be let in?' The doorkeeper can see the man's come to his end, his hearing has faded, and so, so that he can be heard, he shouts to him: 'Nobody else could have got in this way, as this
entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it'."

Such unutterable cruelty!

Kafka’s testament put Brod in the position of the man who sits before the door to the law, and sits there forever. Brod, the man among all men who, Kafka knew, understood the greatness of his writing. Understood, at least, that it was great, although not understanding why, however much he would like to. Why select this person, of all people, as one’s executioner/executor? What kind of trick is that to play?

Perhaps, in the end, you are tired of the one who admires you most. Who loves you for the work. That love like a debt that you owe.

Something happened when Brod picked up that letter. His life changed. It was, in its own wicked way, rather like God’s order to Abraham to kill his son. To obey the order was to disobey the moral law. To disobey the order was to disobey the divine law. And in that moment, the two – which seemed to be one thing – suddenly come apart before your very eyes. Kafka’s writings are full of taboos that are rigorously enforced, even if they exist in no set form, from no set force. Someone must have slandered Josef K. The father, in the Judgment, knows all about his son’s letters to his friend in Russia – knows that far from being a sympathetic friend, he is a rat, a vermin, a betrayer. He is condemned to death. And what happened to Gregor Samsa?

Max Brod, opening that letter, saw the divine order and the moral order come apart. He would revenge himself – revenge himself for the fact that the great work of good that he did, the saving of Kafka’s writings, was made into the act of a shameful thief – by making Kafka, as much as he could, into a saint. For if Kafka wasn’t god, then the script that was printed, oh so minutely, on his chest by Kafka’s finest punishment machine – Dearest Max – would be impossible to read.

Oh, let us not assume too hastily we know what shame is, in this scene, in this scenario, in this history, and who is shameless, and who is not.

I am happy

-I am happy.
-Who is speaking?

A couple of weeks ago I went out with my friend Alan and his friend Owen, who is a philosopher. Trust a philosopher for a beautiful definition – when the conversation came round to the topic of my book, Owen improvised a breathtaking definition of happiness that merged Aristotle and Ricoeur. Unfortunately, my paraphrase won’t be as pretty, but it was something like: happiness is about seeing that one’s life follows a certain purposive narrative, one in which one has been both true to oneself and true to the values one believes in. To achieve this self-fashioning is to be happy. I hope I haven’t deviated too wildly from Owen’s riff.

That riff is, I think, an accurate reflection of how happiness is coded among the cultured level of American, and perhaps simply Western, society in 2009. Happiness, on this reading, is not a patchwork of happy feelings – but it is a judgment. Or, rather, it is an odd hybrid of judgment and intuition, for not only does one judge that this narrative is happy, but that judgment feels happy and reinforces the continuance of the narrative. Finding that I am happy makes me happy, and inclines me to continue in the path I have set out on.

As we saw have noted before, volupté, in the eighteenth century, shed that aspect of itself that was essentially sociable – that agreeableness towards people – and became centered on the self’s pleasure. Happiness, too, seems originally to have been about feeling, that phenomenon in which the self is king and subject. But it moved (in a movement in which one catches a flash of ambivalence) towards being both a feeling and a judgment. As a judgment, it crosses the border from the private to the public. The king is toppled, and – at the same time that politics becomes the science of creating a society in which the pursuit of happiness is maximally possible – one can ask: how do you know you are happy?
Perhaps you are mistaken. You think you are happy. You aren’t happy.

Of course, this is the Freudian moment. If happiness is not simply a private matter, if I don’t have to accept that the statement “I am happy” must be true, because I say so – at that moment we have another problem: the problem of false happiness. The problem that I am happy is not a judgment, but a delusion. An intimate error. An error about our intimacy. And perhaps an error about our access to that narrative, that self fashioning, that self.

the art of projection

"Art of Projection (Projektionskunst) – the exhibition of a proportional extended visible image, which with the help of a magic lantern or of recent projection instruments is thrown as the magnification of certain objects on a white surface" - Meyer’s Conversation Lexicon of 1908

“We get behind the demons, as it were, when we recognize them as projections of hostile feelings, which the survivors cherish against the dead.”

“The process completes itself rather through a particular psychic mechanism, that we are used to calling “projection” in psychoanalysis. The hostility, of which one knows nothing and wants to know nothing, has been thrown out of the inner sphere of perceptions [inneren Wharnehmung] into the outer world, by which one releases its from one’s own person and shoves it off on another person. Not we, the survivors, are glad that we are free of the dead one; no, we mourn him, but he has, curiously enough, become an evil demon, to whom our bad luck is pleasing, and who seeks to bring us into the realm of death. The survivors must now defend themselves against the evil fiend…” – Freud (my translation)

Oh the monsters! Under the opera. Under the pornographic novel. Under the constitutions. And under the monsters, the great grind of life in the old order, on the great estates – taxes and labor duties without end in Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia, Poland… Slavery in Santo Domingo., famine in Bengal…

Freud takes the term from Bleuler, seizes it in a leonine pounce. For here, on the surface, in the shimmer of everyday life of verbal slips, infantile dirty jokes, the herky jerky motion of trams, office politics and thick, thick drapes, here it is that you find the denials, the “I hate to say this”, the “I don’t mean to criticize” – the I don’t mean in general. The demiurge unconscious stirs. Is it awake or asleep?

For Freud, the demons are a projection-creation, and projection itself is the expression of ambivalence. Here, of course, everything seems clear. Locke’s blank sheet of the mind – that white surface - has now been extruded – a screen - as part of a technical process in which images are thrown against it and exaggerated in size. And if we were living in a world that was simply determined, this would suffice. But we are, always, living in a world that has been overdetermined.

For in that world (and aren’t we working in Nemesis’ wake?) the living live with each other in a whisper of suppressed desires, hostilities, purposes, and purposive inattentions – knowing or suspecting what we claim we never knew or suspected, each about each. While one aspect of projection involves transmuting the satisfaction that one has survived the dead into their hostility, another aspect involves the denial that the formerly living loved one had definite moments of hostility, or definite moments of the wrong kind of love. Those evil eye fugues.

And what do we know about other people anyway? Freud notes that projection, in the narrow psychoanalytic sense, is part of a greater system of projection.

“The Projection of unconscious hostility by the tabu of the dead on the demons is only a single example out of a series of processes, to which must be attributed the greatest influence on the shaping of primitive spiritual life. In the above mentioned cases, projection serves to close a conflict of feelings; it finds a natural application in a number of psychological situations that lead to neurosis. But projection is not created as an instrument of defence, it also comes into play, where there is no conflict. The projection of inner perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) to the outside is a primitive mechanism that, for instance, also underlies our sense perceptions – and that thus, in the normal course of things, has the greates part in the shaping of our outer world. Under not yet satisfactorily fixed conditions, our inner perceptions of feeling and thought processes become sense perceptions projected outside, applied to the shaping of the outer world, while supposedly remaining in the inner world. This may hang together, genetically, with the fact that the function of attention originally was not turned to the inner world, but instead to the stream of stimuli from the outer world, and of endopsychic processes received only reports about the developments of pleasure and pain. Only with the development (Ausbildung) of an abstract thought language, through the tying together of the sense remnants of word ideas with inner processes, did these themselves become perceptible.”

The trope of the abstract being taken from, projecting, the material – that place where we begin the white mythology – is transformed, here, into a relation of the outer and the inner. Although the inner, Freud carefully notes, isn’t some counterprojection of the outer. If it becomes perceptible, it was operating before the moment of perceptibility.

The monster's touch

En montant sur le trône, il entra dans le cercle enchanté et sans issue. – Merezhovsky, writing about Alexander I.

The circle that is without an exit and under a spell – isn’t this the circle of the monster? Monster as father substitute. Monster as noble. Monster as libertine. The Monster who demands the right to the first night.

It is impossible for those who have received at least one extra eye from Freud’s angel to ignore the fact that the Marriage of Figaro, which, according to Danton, “killed the nobility”, contains a strong incestuous subplot – the Count, in the story, wants to break up Figaro’s upcoming marriage, in order to have Susanne, Figaro’s fiancé, to himself. One avenue is already closed, since the Count verbally renounced his right to the proverbial “first night”, Thus, he conspires with Marceline, the governess, to make Figaro pay for another contract - a bond he had made with the governess promising to marry her if he couldn’t pay back a sum he’d borrowed from her at any date she named. This plan is spoiled, however, as Figaro recounts the story of his being stolen by the gypsies with details that confirm, for Marceline, that Figaro is her son.

By all accounts, the nobility howled with laughter at the speeches in the play. King Louis XVI, who is usually depicted as one of history’s fall guys, was, at least in this regard, prescient. He read the play before it was put on. The monarch wasn’t in the habit of being a censor, but Beaumarchais was by long, Figaro like ties a familiar in the royal household, the music teacher of Louis’ sisters, a state spy, etc. He pronounced the play dreadful, and said it should not be put on.

Other royalty was not so sensitive. In Poland, the play was actually staged by Prince Nassau, Beaumarchais’s friend, at the court, with the king and various nobles making up the cast.

All of which I bring forward to convince you that an apparently weak link between the overthrow of the old order and Freud’s account of the revolutionary overthrow of the father – which happened in dreamtime, meaning that it is always happening, in a sense. As I hope I’ve made clear, the dissolution of the human limit, or, to reformulate it, the universal-making of universal historywas, from one point of view, the extension of man to the master of the world; but, within that point of view, one price for that extension was the dissolution of the old, defining character of man. His glassy essence was melted down and sold for scrap to the poets, the alienated, the crabby reactionaries, the fevered revolutionaries.

Having made contact with our context – and contact, contagion, Beruehrung, Ansteckung, are very much part of Freud’s text, one we have to get back to – let us go then, you and I, to the introduction of the notion of projection in Totem and Tabu, which occurs in his second chapter. The first chapter is about the incest phobia. The second chapter is entitled, The Tabu and the ambivalence of the feelings ( Gefühlsregungen - affective reactions), and it is here that we can see, like a strategy emerging in a chess game, that the circle of this text is not bound, as one might expect, to return to the infant’s sexuality – but rather, we are enrolled in a movement towards death. But it is a mistake to think that eros is the opposite of thanatos, here – as is signaled by the very word, ambivalence.

The question that Freud wants to answer is: why are ghosts scary? Or: why are the dead fearful?

Why, I could ask, rephrasing this slightly, do I have to wake up and fall back asleep in order to get rid of the monsters?

“This hostility, which in the unconscious bears a painful trace as satisfaction over their death has, by primitives, another fate: it is parried when they shift it to the object of hostility, to the dead themselves. We call this massive defensive process, in the normal as well as the pathological mental life, a projection.”

To be continued

To be continued

tag the text, flee from the text

First things first. Me, my posts are all feints and fidgets, lately. If you want to read something good instead of my debauched stews - go to Rough Theory, who has been writing about the Grundrisse. As always, Marx, in her hands, begins to seem like a Henry James character - if James had only created a character with his own genius, instead of the subpar strivers from the upper class who never quite live up to the authorial voice in which they are caught. RT's Marx is a man who is hyper-aware of epistemological traps, including the trap of thinking that there are just too many epistemological traps to make broad and monumental generalizations.

More notes in and around Totem and Tabu

1. Lawrence Goldman and Michael Emmison, in a 1995 article on Huli children’s games (the Huli live in New Guinea), lament the paucity of cross cultural studies of children’s games and play. In a brief survey of the field, they find Brian Sutton-Smith’s work, outside of the American-European context, to be too developmentalist. Sutton-Smith, in the seventies, did make some cross-cultural studies of children’s play, but imposed upon these cultures a certain story of upward development – like numerous anthropologists of the sixties, and like Freud – in which a society, as it became more “complex”, showed more complex play patterns among its children. Sutton-Smith was sensitive to the fact that, under the peasant or nomadic order, children were workers in a sense in which they were not in the developed economy. But he was also very attracted to the scale, that totem among comparative ethnographers of the Cold War period. As Goldman and Smith put it, cross cultural studies seem inevitably to quote some archetypal studies of children at play, like LeVine and LeVine’s study of a Gusii community in Kenya, as support for the “low or non-existent status of representational play” in many cultures.

2. Well, these are the marks of universal history. Oh, you might think you won’t fuck with universal history, so it won’t fuck with you. You’d be wrong, little greenie.

Yet, I find in Totem and Tabu, which I have been reading this week, a double movement – on the one hand, the construction of the story of “mankind” since the “first feast of mankind” – that feast in which the sons eat the dead father; on the other hand, the creation of certain concepts, notably ambivalence, projection, and the “omnipotence of thought”, which operate to create a series of counter-correspondences, counter-generalities that put the neurotic at the center of the modern. Our representative neurotic. And that, applied to the ‘scientific’ world view, question its latent layer of narcissism, its own “omnipotence of thought.”

3. I’ve been using Sutton-Smith’s notion of children’s play to shake up our notion of this thing and what it is about. At least Sutton-Smith is coherent – if civilization is the development of more complex forms of life, captured how you will (by modes of production, by levels of science, by some notion of technology), then surely the same process will apply to children.

4. And I’ve been using my own memory of my dreamlife. For I do remember my five year old dreams. I do remember the monsters in those dreams. I do remember the strategies – the hiding in closets and peeping out. The hiding under the bed. The hiding behind a tree. And the need I had, in order to get rid of the monster, to wake up. I had to wake up and decide to kill the monster, and then go back to sleep and do it – although often I didn’t have to. Merely waking up and making that decision allowed me to return to a monsterless sleep. But the difference in modes – dreaming/waking – corresponds to another of Sutton-Smith’s findings: the general inability of children, before the age of 9 or so, to play games of “complex” perspective-taking – that is, games in which defense and attack are mixed. Instead, the attackers correspond absolutely to one side, and the defenders correspond exactly to another. It is always the tagger, and never the tagged.

5. There’s a rich layer of this in farce. Think of Chérubin in Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro. He is always hiding. And by hiding, we know – through a dream logic – that the Count is a monster. But, in farce, the level of a five year old’s thinking (and Cherubin’s androgyny is certainly on the sexual level of the child’s idea of sex) is imposed upon by adult thinking – society’s opinions, which come in the form of a monster. Thus, the Count is continually finding him.

6. It is crucial to Freud’s vision of the first feast of humanity that, in some ways, it is a defeat. Not only do the brothers feel guilty about killing and eating a father that they love, as well as hate, but none of them occupy the father’s place. That place is, as it were, forever banned. It is the ultimate monster place.

7. I must begin with projection. Next post, I will write about projection.

link to my happiness article

My friend Alan saw this and sent me the link. It is me, in the paper, on happiness.

Lynn White's thesis

There is a standard environmental history that takes it for granted that anthropocentrism is at the center of the Judeo-Christian story. This notion goes back to Lynn White’s 1967 essay on the “Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, which does, in my view correctly, understand that the Artificial Paradise is not something that popped out of the minds of Baconian natural philosophers in the 17th century, but a fact about the Industrial system in the 19th century:

“The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850, save in the chemical industries, where it is anticipated in the 18th century. Its accept- anceas a normal pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human his- tory since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well. “

However, if this is the material history of the Artificial Paradise, it is preceded, in White’s view, by a sort of mental prehension of man’s mastery of nature, written in the Bible:

“Man named all the animals, thus establishing his domi- nance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes. And, although man's body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God's image. Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertul- lian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient pagan- ism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only es- tablished a dualism of man and na- ture but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. “

In this narrative, the tradition, starting with the Old Testament and going through the Catholic church up through the Protestants, is that God appointed man to rule over the beasts, in accordance with God’s words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28:

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

White’s thesis that the the origin of the Western tradition of mastering nature goes back to our religious roots has sunk into the popular culture. I’ve noticed, at parties, that when I run into someone and the talk turns to my happiness work in progress, inevitably the theme will come up of how Christianity encourages the rape of nature, usually in contrast with the happier and more balanced view of nature taken by … well, the non-Western culture of your choice.

Now, it is obvious from my construction of the rise of the happiness culture and the dissolution of the human limit that I think this history is, in many significant ways, exaggerated and wrong. It is not wrong that the impulse to subdue the earth is part of the code of Judaism and Christianity – it is, however, wrong to think that this impulse is not crossed, polemicized, conflicted, polarized and paralysed within that same tradition. Other significant motifs flow out of, for instance, that same account in Genesis. As is well known, the blessing of replenishing the earth, at the beginning of the Paradise story, becomes the curse of childbirth and the life of toil, at the end of it. In between, God plants and grows a tree of which the fruit is forbidden to Adam and Eve – the first of many taboos on the use of living things. It is not only the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is forbidden to God’s chosen people – in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we are given a long list of interdictions and permissions concerning living things that move upon the earth. And throughout the Old Testament, there is a strong sense of the meaning of sacred places that has nothing to do with man and everything to do with the mysterious will of God. To interpret these things in the light of anthropocentrism is certainly to miss the point – mastery, as a matter of knowing and action, is hedged about throughout the sacred history. As one would expect of an agrarian society that is always just living over the edge of the Malthusian line between a population the land can support and a population it can’t.

White makes a move to counter this by playing with the idea that, in a strong sense, the Pagan religions saw the spirits in things in the world, whereas Christianity divested those things of their spirits:

“In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Be- fore one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. It is often said that for animism. the Church substituted the cult of saints. True; but the cult of saints is func-tionally quite different from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have special shrines, but his citi-zenship is in heaven. Moreover, a saint is entirely a man; he can be approached in human terms. In addition to saints, Christianity of course also had angels and demons inherited from Judaism and perhaps, at one remove, from Zoroastrianism. But these were all as mobile as the saints themselves. The spirits in natural objects, which for- merly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man's effective monopoly on spirit in -this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.”

It would seem to me that a historian, noticing the amounts of bloodshed that were produced in battles over whether Christ was in the wine and bread of the Eucharist or whether they were symbols only, might be hesitant to give this history a wholly Unitarian cast.

I am not saying that White’s macro-story is wholly without merit. The problem is in treated Christianity, over one and a half millennia, as a wholly homogeneous unit, along with treating such things as the genius loci of the tree in terms of syllogistic logic. The “in-ness”, here, of the spirit – the closedness of nature upon itself, or at least its openness to, ultimately, the gods – does not operate as crudely as in White’s sketch.

Far from living in a land and on a planet that humans have mastered, the story, as unfolded, institutionally, by the Catholic and Protestant churches, is of humans living in a world of divine signs, which can easily threaten human society. Plague, drought, cold – all are about a theocentric, rather than an anthropocentric, universe. When, in the psalms, man is called a little lower than the angels, the statement takes on a different cast if, as the Psalmist does, you believe in the angels. Reshuffling that past from a viewpoint in which the angels are, at best, creatures that appear with wings on Christmas cards, is not to understand what is being said here.

Free the Miami Five

Free the Miami five.

This is bullshit. There isn't a word to express my disgust at this vile and stupid action. A bunch of greenhorns were lead by an FBI informer to "pledge allegiance" to Al Quaeda and blow up the Sears Tower, of whose very existence, as has been amply shown by courtroom testimony, they had a dim or non-existent idea.

Meanwhile, Andrew Moonan, the blackwater guard who murdered an Iraqi bodyguard of one of Iraq's vice president's for kicks is still free to do what he wants in the U.S. And the state department employee, Margaret Scobey, his accomplice, the woman who, as acting ambassador, packed Moonan off on a flight to the U.S., has not been charged with accomplice to murder.

The leader of the Miami five, meanwhile, is going to jail for seventy years because the Bush administration, overflowing with racist twats, decided to stir up a terrorist/black scare to garner the KKK/retired vote in the state.

What a disgrace. What a rotten day.

you are it

Brian Sutton-Smith, a psychologist, made important studies of childhood games, play, riddles, jokes and dreams in the sixties and seventies – and he left his mark on a lot of game studies folk. He used both anthropological and psychological perspectives. In a 1971 article, he applied Kenneth Burke’s dramaturgical narrative theory to a corpus of twenty 5 year old children’s dreams, collected by Beverly Elkan:

“A Burkian grammatical analysis of the twenty dreams of twenty five-year-olds in Elkan's collection gives us the following results. While the subject is in the dream on all occasions and while there are occasionally other actors (parents = five; siblings = six; peers = one; relatives = one), the predominant counter-actor is a monster figure in seventeen out of twenty dreams (lion, ghost, tiger, witch, animal, murderer, monster). Where sex is attributed to these figures, females pre- dominate over males, seven to two. In fifteen out of twenty dreams the dreamer is the passive recipient of another's actions. The monster chases, captures, bites, hurts, scares, and injures the dreamer bodily. In only five out of twenty dreams does the dreamer counteract by screaming, saving a sibling, calling for help, or slapping a monster. Half the time the situation is domestic (bed, home, house, or room). Temporal relations are either present or not explicit. The agency through which the acts are effected does not have any consistent shape in this sample. Pre- dominant, however, are monsters coming through doors or in and out of water. The experience also differs: drowning or falling through holes, clothes being removed, being put in machines, being bitten, and so forth. The fact that most dreamers report being scared and yet do not do anything suggests a predominantly "freezing" reaction to fear, which is also the most familiar elementary fear re- sponse reported in animal and human literature.”

I want to put this at the head of my reading of ambivalence and the primal horde theory in Totem and Tabu. As I wrote in the last post, Freud, like Marx, had his version of universal history. The assault of the brothers upon the father, his murder and the feast upon his body was, for Freud, both a founding act and an act that occurred over millennia. The monster coming through the door or out of the water also occurred. It not only occurred with the children in Elkan’s study – it occurred, for instance, in my dreams. And my response was also not to do anything, until I would wake up, and then – frightened – resolve to kill the monster. With which resolution I could then go to sleep again.

Perhaps this moment of freezing, this inability to act, is connected to another of Sutton-Smith’s claims, which is that games involving defense and attack are not fully understood – or rather, understood dialectically – by children at five.

“We may sum up as follows these various approaches to the grammar of the expressive form in dreams, stories, folktales, nursery rhymes, and games. In all of these forms as used by children at the age of five, the "flight syndrome" is the key imaginative structure. Furthermore, it is predialectical. It is possible to envisage defeat and failure without adequate counterbalance, although in fully developed folktales there is usually such redress. Even in Tag-which involves both-the actor and the counteractor are not equally balanced. One never over- comes the "It" figure. At this age level he is only eluded. He is all-powerful, and the other players can only escape. In an unpublished study of children's art, Rand and Wapner have shown that when young children of age seven or less are asked to portray an event such as looking for a lost coin, they also tend to emphasize only one side of the event.19 They may emphasize the lostness of the coin, or the im- penetrability of the grass. It is defeat of action that is represented, rather than a balance between the lostness of the coin and the action of the searcher. In mythic terms, we are perhaps discussing an attitude of "fatefulness." (1971 87).

and the document was sweet in my mouth

figaro.

Je le sais tellement que si monsieur le Comte en se mariant n'eût pas aboli ce droit honteux, jamais je ne t'eusse épousée dans ses domaines.

suzanne.

Hé bien! s'il l'a détruit, il s'en repent; et c'est de ta fiancée qu'il veut le racheter en secret aujourd'hui.

A nobleman renounces certain of his rights. Then he reasserts them, according to ancient documents which, he claims, gives him the right to the first night with the bride of his servants.

A man goes up a smoky mountain. He comes down with two stone tablets, upon which YHWH has, himself, written a pact – a covenant. The covenant, like the nobleman’s, makes requirements of YHWH’s servants that reach into the very depth of their private lives. The man is angered to see that the the people he left at the foot of the mountain are now dancing around an idol. This violates the first rule of the pact YHWH has made with his people - although since the people have not even seen the pact, one wonders how this covenant could be violated. The man dashes the stone tablets to the ground. And thus, he must return to YHWH to ask for the contract again. What is written on the stone tablets, exactly, is ambiguous, as the writer of Exodus and Deuteronomy gives conflicting accounts. It is as if there is some zone of blurring that prevents the contract from being read precisely.

A group of men and women live in the jungle. The physically stronger men are always attacking and killing the others, or capturing the women. The physically weaker men do what they can – curiously, they don’t form a pact among themselves as weaker men and ambush the strong. Instead, a pact is made with a strong man – the knowledge of pact making being, it seems, innate. Where is this pact? What tablet is it carved on? What does it say? We don’t ask this. Here, the zone of blurring is more in the nature of complete obscurity. It is a pact of gesture, apparently. There is no writing, but there is the pact. It is called a social contract.

A man sits at a table. Around him are gathered his twelve disciples. He takes a cup of wine, and says that this is his blood, and that they should drink it. He takes a loaf of bread, and he says this is his body, and that they should eat it.

Oh pacts, devil’s pacts, contracts, covenants, copies, mishnah! Where do you end, and where do I begin?

…
Up until the sixties, Freud was a constant reference in the social sciences. Yet, as early as 1920, Kroeber, in a review of a translation of Totem and Tabu in American Anthropologist, had pretty much torn the book apart, patiently demonstrating the out of date views (totemism as a function of exogamy), the misinterpretation of evidence – as Kroeber points out, Freud’s list of totems is cherrypicked and his list of the social functions accorded to it in the literature homogenized beyond what the evidence can bear, and the ahistorical scene setting (Freud’s appropriation of Darwin’s primal horde idea has no real geographic and temporal coordinates), and yet admitted that the book was too suggestive to be undermined completely by these errors. In 1939, Kroeber wrote a retrospective in which he claims that Freud had said he, Kroeber, had treated the book like one of Kipling’s Just so stories. In particular, Kroeber found the remarks on ambivalence and the remarks on mourning and anguish to be valuable, and in 1939 he made a very American distinction between what was fantasy in Freud – the killing of the father by the primal horde – and what was scientifically valuable – some form of the Oedipus complex. Already at that time, however, Malinowski had reformulated the OC to fit the Trobiand Islanders and their family configuration, so that the father substitute – the mother’s brother – played the role of the father. The Ortigues, in the sixties, published Oedipus in Africa in which they reported, from their clinical practice in Senegal, further modifications of the OC, refusing, at the same time, to generalize over all of Africa (the title of their book notwithstanding).

-- Freud himself thought that his two key books were Totem and Tabu and the Interpretation of Dreams – the latter being the founding text of the analysis of individual psychodynamics, the former being the founding text of collective psychodynamics. As Deleuze and Guattari observed, Freud’s work, like Marx, is a venture in universal history. But universal history in Freud's version plays itself out with a few twists. – one presaged by the romantic notion of “survivals”, bits of primitive lore and usage that still exist, in some modified form, within modernity. In Freud's version, the equation between the savage and the ancient Greek is enriched. New figures emerge, especially the threefold constellation of the child, the neurotic, and the primitive.

This leads, however, to further twists. For by Freud’s logic, there is a continual assault on the normal, which exists only as the result of a mythic catastrophe, or inversion: the slaying and eating of the father. His book, in the end, undermines the position of the norm by undermining the story of rationality. The story told by civilization about itself, or rather, by the civilized about civilization, which is a story that is not separate from civilization itself. Pacts and the bodies they form tend to merge, or tend, at least, to have erased boundaries that separate them one from the other.

In Totem and Tabu, the transposition of the savage to the place of the civilized is an explicit theme: there are a number of references to Kant’s categorical imperative, which is, in a sense, a pillar of the Enlightenment, as a tabu.

the crusoe complex

Let’s begin with a news item far from Vienna, or the 17th century. This was the beginning of Justus Wolpers post on freakonomics today:

I was reading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row last night, and I was really struck by how the following passage speaks to the forces behind our current economic predicament:

“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men — kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling — are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest — sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest — are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.”
The usual cheap shot after citing a literary figure would be to argue that modern economics can’t possibly grapple with such issues. But it can. The incentives that Steinbeck describes are the incentives described in standard economic models. Agency theory is almost entirely devoted to developing mechanisms to deal with the fact that private and social interests often diverge; information economics tells us a lot about when these incentives are active; and behavioral economics tells us how people balance the opposing forces Steinbeck identifies.”

To which the first response in the comments was this:

“The reason we’re caught in this “only greed and self-interest produces anything or can make people successful, but it leads to dishonesty and causes harm to others!” is that we don’t distinguish between fair, mutually beneficial self-interest and dishonest self-interest where the risk is in someone else’s hands, at someone else’s expense. All the benevolence in the world won’t do the work that a greedy businessman can do, but that greedy businessman needs to be risking his own assets.”

My response to this comment was to rub my eyes. Does anybody seriously believe that the greedy businessman hatched out of a moonegg? No, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker were all once children. They lived in families. They got fed by either benevolent or not so benevolent parents. They did not, mewling infants, earn their keep. In fact, the family of the greedy businessman was often there, throughout his early life, lending him their connections, showering him with their money. And though, from 20 to 30, he or she might have cut a great swathe and been a great swaggerer, it is more likely than not that the greedy businessman has a home, a spouse, kids.

The whole understructure of the economy is, and will always be, based on these communal, familial, emotional, ambivalent ties, and none other. Ties of love and hate, which precede all economic epiphenomena. I am stating mere platitudes here. And yet, of course, when you read the commonplaces of the economists, and those, like the commenter, who live in the world of commerce, you would come away with a quite different idea of life trajectories – it is as if they were all products of a harsh and brutal orphanage. They all have Crusoe-fied themselves in that this is the story they tell. It is a story that is contradicted at every step by who they are, what they do, where they came from. Retrospectively, they cast the autistic net of rational choice or some such folly over the life they came out of, but this is gossamer of the most spurious type, a spider web thrown over social phenomena to try to make it cohere with fantasy.

It is the fantasy of contracts and pacts that has been puzzling me. Amie rightly has pointed out to me how odd and unmotivated all this contracting seems - although the contracts always do seem to be followed by destruction of the contract. Christoph Haitzmann makes several contracts, or posts several bonds (for his body and soul) with the devil. And yet, since he keeps tearing them up, what, exactly, is their function? This multiplication of contracts is not confined to the satanic realm – indeed, the ten commandments, which are, besides being rules, a covenant – a bond, a contract – are written in stone by God’s own hand – and promptly broken in anger by Moses, who comes down from Sinai and catches his people dancing around a golden calf. Moses has to go to God again, and God graciously agrees to write the contract one more time.

The contractual view, the view which provides the grounds for believing that it is the greed of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker which is at the base of our economic life – instead of the love and hates of those that raised all three in the oikos and will so continue, world without end, amen – is a view of a kill and a killing from a text, but what a funny text. A text that comes into view and disappears. That bi-locates. That is written, figuratively or literally, in blood.

Bely's scream

Orientation

A poem, first. Blok’s The gray sky is still beautiful

And cold lights in the gray sky
Clothed the tsar’s Winter Palace
And the armored warrior in black won’t answer
Until dawn overtakes him

Then, reddening above the watery abyss
Let him lower his sword more gloomily,
To lie dead in a useless struggle
With the savage mob for an ancient fairy tale.

And a story. I found this in Mochulsky’s biography of Andrei Bely, which is, unfortunately, the only one in English.

In 1921, after Blok had died, and Bely was trying to get out of Russia, Bely gave a lecture that was supposed to be on Blok’s poetry. Maria Tsvetaeva was there. She wrote that in the middle of the lecture, Bely lost control and began to scream: “From starvation! From Starvation! Gout from starvation, instead of overeating!” and then he went on to his no doubt astonished audience:

‘ I have no room! I am the writer of the Russian land, and I don’t even have a stone on which to lay my head… I wrote Petersburg! I foresaw the downfall of tsarist Russia, I had a dream of the end of the tsar in 1905!… I cannot write! It’s a disgrace! I must stand in line to get my ration of fish! I want to write! But I also want to eat! I am not a spirit! For you I am not a spirit!.. But I am a proletarian… Lumpenproletariat. Because I am all in rags. Because they did away with Blok, and they want to do away with me. I will not permit it! I will scream until I am heard! A-a-a-a!…’

I will not permit it.
It was on ancient fairy tales, and their bloody destruction, that we have built this artificial paradise. And it will not last. It is dying in our bloodstreams as I write this. And in the sky, the tree branches, in the great migrations. So: what was it for? All this happiness.

I will scream until I am heard.

To fall into the hands of the lord is a fearful thing

The word comes, and like a misbegotten fetus, it tangles itself in its own feeding tubes and dies. The word comes, and it takes up its place in the midst of meaning that that primitive, the monkey handed mind, would so like to put down, make materialize, bring out of nothingness into somethingness – and yet those other words aren’t there, and the word lacks the mind’s private conversation.

I wrote this post yesterday evening, and I re-wrote it this morning. And I’m re-writing it again, against the curse on all violations of the law, first thought, best thought. The curse is one of a certain gloominess of aspect, a certain loss of freshness, a lack of the look of spontaneity.

My quotes from the little known Justus Moser have to be more connected to the trails we have danced or sneaked down. In particular, to the persistence, in these notes, of the theme of the closed economy. The peasant economy summarized by George Foster like this:
“In fact, it seems accurate to say that the average peasant sees little or no : relationship between work and production techniques on the one hand, and: the acquisition of wealth on the other. Rather, wealth is seen by villagers in the same light as land: present, circumscribed by absolute limits, and having no relationship to work. One works to eat, but not to create wealth.”

A leitmotif in this work is that the separation of the “old’ and the “new’ worlds, the pre-Columbian attitude in intellectual or cultural history, needs to be smashed. The opening up of the world, literally, dissolved one of the great defining features of peasant culture. The dissolution of peasant culture may well be the most important fundamental thing that happened in the last four hundred years, underneath every other feature of modernity.

Moser’s importance, in that story, is to express, in Enlightenment terms, a great tradition explanation for the closed social system that, in effect, is out of synch with the movement of the great tradition in his time. He was expressing, if you will, the way the great tradition had impressed itself upon the closed world. Even as that world was giving way – and certainly it was, certainly, as people like Charles Tilley have pointed out, capitalism of a primitive kind, with the centralizing features of factory life described by Marx, was already present in the countryside in France, England, Prussia – it was, of course, still dominant, and well able to interpret itself.

This is not of course the first time I’ve written about satanic pacts – they keep coming up. Just as the contract as a text object keeps coming up. When the peasants of the Cauca Valley in Colombia baptized their money with their children, or when Balzac’s Raphael makes his wish on the talisman made out of wild ass skin, they are, in a sense, giving us a sense of the life of the contract before the sharp differentiation of the written and the body. The text itself is part of the body – in the case of Haitzmann, the contract with the devil is written in, or signed in blood – if of course it was written at all. Freud claims that there was never a text object there to begin with. That the life of the name I sign on the thing that I sign should become my double is, perhaps, an image of the social contract (a contract like Haitzmann’s pact with the devil in that it is a mindforged thing) upon which we should reflect.

Okay, this is done. Now, onto what I wrote this morning.
...

Justus Moser wrote a number of fragments about serfdom. They are all oriented by the desire to show how the feudal structure began, for Moser was enough of a child of the enlightenment that he believed in the efficacy of the origin story. His editor sort of mashed them all together in his collected works, under the title, On Serfdom.

Moser begins by taking a defensive tone, writing that while all right thinking people now abhor feudalism, they fail to explain why it ever existed in the first place.

Moser explanation of the ancient institutions is advanced under the principle that a people shouldn’t be supposed to be simply stupid. This remark is directed against the predominate Voltairian tone concerning superstition taken by the philosophes – but Moser’s wording is startlingly similar to the remark in Wittgenstein’s notes on Frazer, made one hundred fifty years later:

“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.
But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.”

Unlike Wittgenstein, however, Moeser doesn’t think that the practices are simply there, and the point is to describe them. They do have a rationale, and that rationale can be unlocked by means of a speculative reconstruction of the first feudal act, so to speak. Yet he ends up telling us a number of origin stories. The story that is most consistent with his point is one set at the beginning of the world. Abraham – “or whatever the name of the fellow was who owned the first large flock of sheep’” – allows his shepherds to herd their flocks with his while they tend the entire flock. The result is that the sheep of the shepherds fatten while Abraham’s sheep decline; the sheep of the shepherds flourish while Abraham’s sheep are seized by wolves; Abraham’s sheep sicken, the shepherds’ sheep do not. Finally, Abraham’s wife, making an Eve like appearance, said to him:”Husband, if we don’t change this, we will become poor, and our shepherds rich.” Abraham agrees. He not only forbids his shepherds to herd their sheep with his, he forbids them from owning sheep. ‘Everything that the servants produce should belong to me as Lord.”

Moser varies this story with other produce and other households, in all of which the paterfamilias must either prey upon the servants or be preyed upon. The dynamic of predation is the dynamic of hierarchy – every higher level demands of every lower level a certain symbolic disarmament of its ability to prey, until we reach the king’s position. Thus, to fall, in Moser’s schema, is to fall among wolves – you either keep your level or you expose yourself to attack and dismemberment.

Moser, like Freud, as we will see, justifies his theory by referring to ‘traces’, survivals: “From whence does it come then, that so many traces of serfdom are found in all states where the people live by means of agriculture?”

Now here, indeed, is father substitution in which ambivalence is inscribed in the system. The good father is a father at all due to the fact that he is a predator. Moser expressly compares the children of the paterfamilias to the servants. To fall, in this system, is a dreadful thing, and hard to see the end of.

And so we come to the de Certeau.