A stele is found in the desert: what kingdom was this?

You say we're almost all alone together...

“…il doit se dire d’avance que ceux qui les écrivent ne sont pas des Français, des beaux-esprits, des académiciens, des philosophes ; mais des provinciaux, des étrangers, des solitaires, de jeunes gens, presque des enfants, qui, dans leurs imaginations romanesques, prennent pour de la philosophie les honnêtes délires de leur cerveau.”- from the introduction to La Nouvelle Heloïse

When I talk about my happiness thesis to people who aren’t necessarily readers of LI, a spark of recognition will appear in their eyes, even if they disagree with me. But that spark dies when I try to explain the human limit.

My thesis is built upon these two themes. One of those themes is the emergence of a happiness culture, defined as a culture that adopts happiness as a norm by which to judge one’s life and expectations (on the individual level) and the success and intents of one’s collectivity (on the social level). That the happiness culture is a background constant for both capitalist reality and the socialist dream points to the way it emerges from the ruin of the previous order, the order of dependence and the limited good. But my second theme is that the happiness culture emerged in tandem with a particular kind of alienation at its margins. This alienation from the total social fact of happiness saw a dangerous cultural and social vacuum, which threatened the human imagination, as a product of the norms of the happiness culture. Of course, they didn’t see it as programmatically as I am expressing it here – they saw it in bits and pieces, and the alienated marginals often borrowed their vernacular and concepts from the happiness culture, often used unhappiness as a protest not against the norm of happiness itself, but against a system that produced unhappiness.

I am intent on tracing the interplay between, on the one hand, the creation of the happiness norm, and, on the other hand, the dissolution of the human limit – but as the latter process is dialectically complex, it is not an easy thing to trace. The idea that human power – through science, or through conquest – takes dominion over the world is an old, positivist theme. But in that process, the old human thing, defined by a world of limits and dependences, of sanctions and gods, necessarily collapses; its reconstruction as a human subject is, in a sense, the interiorization of a system of management that was not predominant in the old human thing.

Obviously, the philosophical history of the decline of the standing of ‘place’ has a connection with one part of my story – that is, the story of the dominion of man over the world. But, insofar as place is a notion that is neither formal nor material – as Aristotle noticed – we should notice place spreads over the physical and the moral order. It would be easy to draw the Heideggerian parallel between the displacement of place by space and the displacement of Dasein by the cogito. This may be one way of describing what is happening in the background. My notion is that the great transformation to capitalism pivoted upon a new sense of the substitutability of the human thing: Marx’s abstract labor. And there were several aspect of this new regime of substitutability – among them, the notion of equality. If the old order presumed on its ‘places’, with everything in its proper place, the emerging order presumes on its spaces – an equality can be set up so that theoretically, all subjects have a place in the public domain. And that means, as Condorcet was quick to see, that men and women have equal footing there.

Rousseau is an exemplary figure in as much as he experience to the full the agony of these shifts. And so it is that I am approaching him from the viewpoint of the place of women, because there is a maximum tension in Rousseau’s thought at this point. One shouldn’t, however, fall into the habit of thinking of this as a history that occurs in “thought’ – rather, it is a real history fought out in homes, shops, streets, frontiers, courts, markets, etc. It is under the sign of place and displacement that the notion of liberty and the notion of the stranger – a figure that incorporates the modality of adventure to which I keep returning – comes in. Instead of presuming that I know about public and private spaces from a sort of Habermasian assumption about coffee houses and domestic spaces, I have a notion that it is the possibility of the stranger that is on the horizon of the public/private divide.

This note I shore against some future use.

no place

Ladies and Gentlemen we are floating in space

In the twentieth century, century of Freud and Heidegger, World Wars and nuclear races, the fashion in philosophical history was not to paint a progress, an arrow arranging itself in forward flight amongst the confusion of events, a piece of the universal history, that to which both the reader and the writer served as goals; but rather, to trace some disaster, some lost moment, some irreversible waste, under the sign of forgetting, with both the reader and writer undergoing a cure. Whether forgetting a childhood trauma or childhood sexuality or the barbarism it took to build the monuments of civilization or being itself – these histories were accounts of what, at best, could be construed as the negative externality of progress, and at worst, as the exposure of its grift.

In several books and numerous articles, Edward Casey has tried to revive a history of place – a history that is “virtually unknown.” He is wary of the Heideggerian model, but at the same time, he traces a thematic that falls within its orbit.

“Yet this rich tradition of place-talk has been bypassed or forgotten for the most part, mainly because place has been subordinated to other terms taken as putative absolutes: most notably Space and Time. Beginning with Philoponus in the sixth century A.D. and reaching an apogee in fourteenth century theology and above all in seventeenth century physics, place has been assimilated to space. The latter, regarded as infinite extension, has become a cosmic and extracosmich Moloch that consumes every corpuscle of place to be found within its greedy reach. As a result, place came to be considered a mere “modification” of space (in Locke’s revealing term) – a modification that aptly can be called a site, that is, leveled down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises. (The Fate of Place, x)

In Plato’s Timaeus, place and space are distinguished as topos and chora – although this distinction, it has been said, doesn’t correspond to our place and space schemata. Chora sometimes seems to be place, too; certainly that is what it seems to mean in other Greek texts, and, sometimes, in the Timaeus. Chora, the receptacle, the container, has been associated by some scholars with choris, which means ‘independently’, or, as a noun, means “widow or one bereaved’. (Malpas, 25). It would be convenient if Plato simply made the topos/chora distinction on lines that correspond to our own modern understanding of space and place, and that it was overturned by Aristotle and the tradition afterwards. However, that is not what happened. The binaries don’t come to us on the wings of textbooks, 0/1 for our amusement and edification, but are difficult fliers, birds that sometimes do and sometimes don’t flock together. Among which there are not a few mockingbirds.

Aristotle wrote appreciatively in the Physics IV that Plato was the first to try to tell what place is, and he follows Plato to a certain extent. Place doesn’t seem to be a form, in the Platonic sense, nor is it a body. “We can readily see that place cannot be either form or material.” Aristotle gives five reasons for this, which show the distance between Aristotle’s place and our place – although our place is a divided house, and perhaps it is not just the great tradition, science in the house, but a host of little traditions to, a popular psychology of place.

If, then, we look at the question in this way the place of a thing is its form. But, if we regard the place as the extension of the magnitude, it is the matter. For this is different from the magnitude: it is what is contained and defined by the form, as by a bounding plane. Matter or the indeterminate is of this nature; when the boundary and attributes of a sphere are taken away, nothing but the matter is left.

This is why Plato in the Timaeus says that matter and space are the same; for the 'participant' and space are identical. (It is true, indeed, that the account he gives there of the 'participant' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teaching'. Nevertheless, he did identify place and space.) I mention Plato because, while all hold place to be something, he alone tried to say what it is.

In view of these facts we should naturally expect to find difficulty in determining what place is, if indeed it is one of these two things, matter or form. They demand a very close scrutiny, especially as it is not easy to recognize them apart.

But it is at any rate not difficult to see that place cannot be either of them. (1) Form and Material cannot be dissociated from that to which they belong, whereas the place can be separated. As we pointed out, where air was, water in turn comes to be, the one replacing the other; and similarly with other bodies. Hence the place of a thing is neither a part nor a state of it, but is separable from it. (2)For place is supposed to be something like a vessel-the vessel being a transportable place. But the vessel is no part of the thing.

In so far then as it is separable from the thing, it is not the form: qua containing, it is different from the matter.

Also it is held that what is anywhere is both itself something and that there is a different thing outside it. (Plato of course, if we may digress, ought to tell us why the form and the numbers are not in place, if 'what participates' is place-whether what participates is the Great and the Small or the matter, as he called it in writing in the Timaeus.)

(3) Further, how could a body be carried to its own place, if place was the matter or the form? It is impossible that what has no reference to motion or the distinction of up and down can be place. So place must be looked for among things which have these characteristics.

(4) If the place is in the thing (it must be if it is either shape or matter) place will have a place: for both the form and the indeterminate undergo change and motion along with the thing, and are not always in the same place, but are where the thing is. Hence the place will have a place.

(5) Further, when water is produced from air, the place has been destroyed, for the resulting body is not in the same place. What sort of destruction then is that?" - translation by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye

Aristotle’s notion that there is an “own” place formed a flaw in the fabric of this argument that unraveled it for Philopunus. Edward Grant has summarized Philoponus’ anti-Aristotelian argument like this: “In Philoponus’ cosmos, bodies move in an absolutely immobile, three-dimensional void space. When a body movies, it leaves behind successive parts of that void equal to itself and occupies other parts equal to itself. Although bodies occupy and then depart from successive parts of an absolute void space, the latter remains immobile. By virtue of its absolute immobility, then, no part opf the void space can be transported anywhere to occupy another part of void space…”

“Not only did he [Philoponus] distinguish between material and immaterial dimensions, and thus destroy the basis of one of Aristotle’s most powerful arguments against the exitence of vacuum, but his conception of vacuum as three dimensional extension always filled with body and never existent per se was accepted in some form the Italian natural philosophers of the sixteenth century, some of whom filled their separate, empty space with light (Patrizi) or ether (Bruno).” (21) The counterpart to the Italian humanists in Britain were the natural philosophers, working in the Baconian vein. Among them, Casey has spotted William Gilbert (who wrote the famous treatise on the magnet) for a remark in one of his works that could serve as a slogan for expulsion of place from the order of the sciences: “locus nihil est, non existit, vim non habet…” place is nothing, doesn’t exist, has no strength (vim) (Casey 1998:135)

Rousseau and the women III

In the post before the Simmel post, I quoted a bit from one of Saint Preux’s letters describing Clarens in the Nouvelle Heloise. In that letter, a new question of place arises – but so discretely that it is hardly even heard, hardly exists:

They [the servants] well know that their surest fortune is attached to that of the master, and that they will never lack anything so long as the house is seen to prosper. In serving it, therefore, they serve their patrimony, and augment it in rendering their services agreeable. This is their greatest interest. But this word is hardly in its place on this occasion; for I have never seen a place where the rules [police] or the interests are so wisely managed, and where, however, they have less influence than here. Everything is done by attachment …

A word that is “hardly in its place” – a word that could be replaced by another word – I want to take this exchange over a place and make it thematic, even though it is not thematic, here. In fact, place (‘place’ and ‘lieu’) exists in Rousseau more as the stitching, one might say, then the clothing – more as what goes on semi-automatically, rather than what goes on thematically. Plus, of course, how does one make place a theme? Isn’t there a problem here in the fact that the conditioned is in the set of the condition? Especially as the place, here, is the place of words – and that relationship of places is vaguely but distinctly traced as the condition for the thematized condition of place.

Because I’ve been threading about Freud and projection, perhaps, this exchange of places between attachment and interest evokes the familiar Freudian spectacle of denial, which is the result of the logic of the Freudian bureaucracy: the lack of a ‘no’ function in the unconscious, and the management of the no by the superego.

However, I don’t want to take up the Freudian thread here, but rather speculate that the conflict between interest and attachment is, perhaps, definitive of the place of women in Rousseau, or the place of women in the society that Rousseau wanted, or in the revolutionary society that was associated with Rousseau. Three societies, linked by a disjunction that slightly differs them, but invites an exchange of places. It is as though here, below what is thematic, an intersigne is exchanged.

That slight incommensurability of attachment and interest in Rousseau has been felt, if not analyzed, all through the long career in assessments of Rousseau, like the pea under the mattress of the princess. The position of English liberalism is represented by Bertrand Russell, who writes, in his History of Philosophy, that Rousseau payed “lip service to democracy” but that in the Social Contract, where he dispenses with “sentimentality”, he “tend[ed] to justify the totalitarian state.” This is an image of Rousseau, and in general an image of what went wrong with the French Revolution, that was transposed into the Cold War culture. Hannah Arendt, who far outstripped Russell in her understanding of the sentiments, was a shrewder reader of Rousseau, but her reading elaborates on the charge of totalitarianism by continually confounding Rousseau with Robespierre. Never mind that all sides in the Revolution called upon Rousseau – no, in 1962, when Arendt’s On Revolution was published, one was aware that the general will, that madness to sweep away all property arrangements, was alive on the edges of the Imperium, advancing from the peripheries: the sans-culottes (or the guerillas in the rice paddies in Vietnam, or in Algiers, or the civil rights marchers in Mississippi) could think that they embodied the popular will, the secret popular will underneath the orderly exterior. Possibly the general will had been frozen, paralyzed by the vocabulary of the colonial order, paralyzed by every mechanism put in place to manipulate the collective dream – the American dream, the dream of freedom, the pop dream. This is what made Rousseau a figure as frightening in his way to the Imperium as Marx.

I want to quote two other passages that are about and not about place in Rousseau – in my next post. Meanwhile, I’d suggest those who have not read the Nouvelle Heloise to look at Amie’s summary of one of the narrative ends of that book in the comment to this post.

apologies all around

I'm sorry I have not added to this thread, but my work load at the moment is too killing. But I will be returning to this soon.

the place of women II: A digression

In the Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel speaks of money as the “absolute tool”. Simmel begins with one of those foundation stories with which philosophy is littered - the baby who sees his mother point, the man on the deserted island, the two men handing each other tools and instructions. In this story, the stress falls upon the disparity between what an individual wants of another individual and what he has to trade for it. What this situation is supposed to show us is that, in the encounter of the two individuals, everything is too personal. They are too much themselves, they are persons whose qualities require some intermediary to make them collaborate, to make them less personal one with the other. In this encounter, the peculiarities and situations of both individuals are highly pertinent – they are, so to speak, rooted in their situations. They are, one could say, the prisoners of their own authenticity. Simmel postulates that what is required, here, is some third, some intermediary, some absolute means that will enable these situations to interrelate. And in so doing, that means will uproot them. This might not seem to be the obvious result of money, the absolute means. It turns out, however, that money does change the situation of the men not only in regards to their relation to each other, but in regards to their identity with their situations. Their places. Which have been constructed so far on the premise of opposition, and which now encounter the social symbol of absolute indifferent. It is this indifference to what it is a means to, this openendedness to ends, that makes money such an absolute and finally subversive means.

As we fall into the habit, then, of thinking not of the ends, but in terms of this means, money begins to penetrate other social niches. It is the “nature of the instrument to persist through its individual applications or to be called into service in a generally not foreseeable number of occasions.” And this, Simmel thinks, is the secret of the dominance of money: “Out of this particular value of money, its complete lack of connection to all things and moments of time, its complete renunciation of any proper end on its own behalf, the abstraction that derives from it mediate character, flows the superior weight of that which money offers over that which the commodity offers.”

Now, it is under the sign of its penetration into all spheres, as a pure instrument, and its domination of commodities, as being disconnected ideally from all situations – from production itself – that Simmel introduces the effect of money on the style of modern life. Of the style of life, Simmel gives an account that emphasizes the ‘circle’ as the essential community form:

"One of the most common images under which the organization of the substance of life is made clear is its assimilation into a circle, in the center of which stands the actual ‘I’. There is a mode of relationship between this I and the things, people, ideas and interests that we can only designate as the distance between both. An as far as we deal with an object it can, remaining substantially unchanged, come near to the center or be pushed back to the periphery of our range of vision and circle of interest; but this doesn’t effect, for instance, the fact that our inner relationship to this object is changed, but just the inverse, we can designate certain relations of the I to its contents only through the intuitive symbol of a specific or changing distance between both.” These distances are not separated for the I from the object, in other words, but “according to its distance from our organs - differences not only of clearness, but of quality and of the whole character of the felt image – it is easy to extend this symbolization therein that the differences even of inner relations to the things are interpreted as differences of distance to it. (My translation)

”

To get near a thing, in other words, symbolizes a stage in the understanding of a thing. To be “near” a person is to be in a particular relationship with a person. In the world picture given to us by science, Simmel says, this relation of near and far is displaced from its instinctive, or at least traditional, coordinates: our instruments for getting near – like the microscope or the telescope – at the same time tell us how far we are from the objects we are pointing at. How far I am from the piece of skin that, under the microscope, I see is a much different looking thing than the skin that I thought I was as near to as… my own skin. Accordingly, “the anthropomorphizing of nature leaves us, in the subjective perspective, after the side of the feelings and of the, as always, misleading beliefs, a littler distance between men and things that we have at present.” And in this double process, Simmel says, money plays a role.

I’ll return to what that role is after I interpose some excerpts from Rousseau that continue the theme we began to see take shape under Morgenstern’s suggestion about the place of women, or rather, a woman, Julie, in the autarky of Clarens. Though Morgenstern doesn’t mention Simmel, I think the Philosophy of Money gives us an appropriate framework within which to see more clearly why Rousseau’s heroines end unhappily – and more generally, why women, in the moment that they are set in their place, collapse a whole ideology of places.

A woman's place

Let’s take up where we left off: with Madame de Stael’s remark that, in our current social arrangements, women are “neither in the order of nature nor in the order of society.”

D’Agoult cites de Stael not to refer to Rousseau’s time, but to the new, post revolutionary society. However, since the very staging of that opposition is, in a sense, signed by Rousseau, it is natural to think that Rousseau would have something to say to women and about women. In fact, when d’Agoult writes that Rousseau “spoke” to women, she could well be referring to the introduction of Emile, in which Rousseau literally says that he is speaking to mothers. Less literally, the Nouvelle Heloise was an event in the third life of women all over Europe, and surely the letters of Julie speak to women, in d’Agoult’s sense.

Certainly, d’Agoult is onto something when she contrasts Condorcet, with his eagerness to end the system of submission that shackles women in the civil sphere, and Rousseau, for whom it would seem that a woman’s place is in the private sphere. By the social logic that opposes independence and dependence, women, then, should be dependent. And yet, this can’t be all the story. Rousseau could see, and even advocate for, the transformation of the order of dependence, the traditional order; by committing himself to this change, he deprives himself of the traditional reasons that women should be dependent. He deprives himself of the social sanction of that hierarchy. Moreover, how can women have a place at all if all places are to be rearranged? If the old order’s corruption calls for revolutionary action? In fact, as Helena Rosenblatt has pointed out in an article defending Rousseau from the charge of misogyny, even in the Letter to D’Alembert, which has often been seen as the most misogynistic of Rousseau’s writings about women, a closer reading will find that Rousseau is not writing against all women, but pleading the case for women of civic virtue. For Rosenblatt, one should never forget that Rousseau wrote: “Every revolution began with the women. Through a woman Rome gained her liberty, through a woman the plebians obtained the consulate, through a woman the tyranny of the decemvirs was ended; it was the women who saved Rome [when besiged by Coriolanus].”

In all of these examples, Rosenblatt claims, we see women in a different light than in the usual Enlightenment discourse about the ‘softening’ power of women. Rather, Rousseau aimed at the opposite.

And yet, those examples of women outside the house are also examples of states of emergency. If the revolution begins with women, doesn’t it end by putting women back in their place?

The theme I’d like to follow, the effect I’d like to investigate in Rousseau, is, in a sense, a detour around the question of whether D’Agoult is right, or whether Rosenblatt is right. It is the question of the place of these beings who are not in nature or society. I am inspired here by the starting point of Mira Morgenstern’s book on Rousseau. Why, Morgenstern asks, is it that the model of a woman’s place in Emile and the Nouvelle Heloise is in such discord with the arc of the narrative in both books? For surely if the author of Emile is right about women, then the education of Sophie should be crowned with success, rather than tragedy. And Julie’s ultimate failure to be happy in her marriage to Wolmar in the Nouvelle Heloise – Wolmar, the man who her father chose, and who does his best to get her to love him – condemns absolutely that marriage and all the arrangement of the idyll of Clarens, their utopian estate?

Why is it that Rousseau does not gild his theme of women’s place with happy endings, in other words? Why does the narrative force seem to perversely turn upon the conceptual advice? Where is a woman’s ‘place’ in all of this?

I am not taking that as a starting place for an examination of the narratives so much as an allowance for seeking the source of the tension created in Rousseau’s work by women. Ultimately, I want to focus on a suggestion of Morgenstern’s in her brilliant chapter on the household set up by Wolmar and Julie in la Nouvelle Heloise. In a subsection about women and power entitled The Benevolent Patriarchy, she shows that the utopian arrangement of the household set up by Wolmar at Clarens, she writes:

“On the face of it, then, Clarens would appear to be the perfect example of benevolent paternalism. However, here the paradox reappears: using the familial metaphor based on love to operate an estate that must be run on the principles of order, although perhaps in a different guise than expected. Wolmar does use love to run the entire estate, servants and family alike. But this love is not a true emotion. Rather, it is a disguise for absolute control. This use of love as a cover for authoritarian domination emphasizes Wolmar’s cynical realization that while different principles ostensibly underlie the organization of family, citizens, and servants, any relationship involving people can be translated into a matter of politics and power, albeit in different strengths and forms.” (208)

The problem of dependence for Rousseau is the problem of attachment. As St. Preux himself remarks about the Wolmar’s schema, the whole thing is based on attachment.

‘They [the servants] well know that their surest fortune is attached to that of the master, and that they will never lack anything so long as the house is seen to prosper. In serving it, therefore, they serve their patrimony, and augment it in rendering their services agreeable. This is their greatest interest. But this word is hardly in its place on this occasion; for I have never seen a place where the rules [police] or the interests are so wisely managed, and where, however, they have less influence than here. Everything is done by attachment: one might say that venal souls are purified in entering into this abode of wisdom and union.” [1873:430]

Rousseau’s utopian solution to the problem of interest has not drawn enough attention, Morgenstern thinks. Underneath Wolmar’s benevolence is a very manipulative economic structure:

The second obstacle to the servants’ developing any independent notions of their own good as distinct from the well-being of their masters lies in the economic structure of Clarens. Wolmar’s aim is to make the small estate of Clarens as self-sufficient as possible. To this end, outside trade is discouraged unless it is strictly necessary. Further enforcing the autarky of Clarens is the internal exchange system fostered among the inhabitants and workers of Clarens. Thus, for example, the grocer is paid with grain for his supplies, while the rents are used to furnish the houses owned by Wolmar. This economic system, dispensing as much as possible with the circulation of money, finds its philosophical justification in the avoidance of any intermediaries that can render human exchange potentially inauthentic. A most important side effect of this self sufficiency, however, is that this exchange system effectively prevents the servants and workers of Clarens from ever leaving.” [212]

Here, indeed, is place – place closed upon itself. It is here that the problem of the place of women finds a solution – a solutin which, on another scale, is the solution for society as a whole. But the problem with this solution is two-fold: it fosters desperate attachments, rather than love; and it prevents and minimizes the chance of a stranger appearing. The latter is, I think, crucial to Rousseau’s unresolvable problem of reconciling love and place.

Jean-Jacques and the women

They only want you when you’re seventeen
When you’re twenty one, you’re no fun…

Marie d’Agoult, in her summation of the struggle for equal rights for women in France, felt she had to dispell a myth about where Rousseau stood in this history:

“It is to Condorcet and not to Jean-Jacques, as is generally believed, who deserves credit for the initiative of reforms proposed in the education and condition of women. The first man posed the principle of the entire equality of the sexes. Jean-Jacques, who had spoken to women with an incomparable eloquence and tenderness, showed himself, however, less liberal and less serious to them than Fenelon. In his plan of education, which was applicable neither to the women of the people, who did not occupy him, a man sprung from the people, nor even to the women of the middle class, but only to wealthy girls, he established as a principle that women ought to be exercised in constraint; that dependence is their natural state. He wanted to see developed in them not reason, which would render still more painful this blind submission to the will of others, but the talents of agreeableness, on the condition, however, that this be in the frivolous and subaltern manner. M. de Stael, more rational and firmer in her judgments, removed the prejudices of Jean Jacques. Her strong but proud soul was open to all the grand presentiments of modern times. She declared that, in the actually existing state of affairs, women are neither in the order of nature nor in the order of society.”

I’m going to be doing a series of posts on Rousseau, women, money, strangers and the lateral. I thought d’Agoult’s text is a good place to start, both as a statement of the prosecutor’s case against Rousseau and because of the strange intimacy of the denunciation – one made about a man she calls “Jean-Jacques” throughout. A man who spoke to women, and thereby gained a deceptive reputation among them – for though he strirred them up, he meant, all the time, to bring them down. This is, of course, a voice that is very familiar – it is the serpent’s voice; it is the voice of the seducer.

There is something brilliant and momentous about the conjunction, at the end of this passage, between a Rousseau who addresses the daughters of the rich and the more historically informed de Stael. Indeed, it is impossible to talk of Jean Jacques and women without running into the ambivalence of the place of women, played out against a background in which the old order of dependence was dissolving.

Amie's Excellent News - and the ten song countdown!

Amie, long the friend of LI, told me some excellent news yesterday, and I persuaded her to let me celebrate it with a list of ten songs. What the news is can probably be gathered from my not so subtle subtitles.


The brain - Soave il vento


The beating heart Santigold – Creator.


Eyelids – Talking Heads Naïve Melody

Oh expressive Mouth - Yet nature is made better by no mean/But nature makes that mean
Sezen Aksu – Rakkas

Hair - Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy
Dhoom machale

Skin that blocks the light of the sun - the birth of our shadows
Dandy Warhols –Good Morning

Hearing voice makes space from which we dare not turn
Metric Help I’m Alive

And the red blood cells then came then
Dionysos et Kaolin C’est la vie

And the world was the best thing sense had ever sensed
Stravinksy Sacre de Printempts, part 1

Kick out the jams Sexy Sushi – Hibernatus
J'ai tout visité en 2 secondes,
Pékin, Tokyo, la Joconde.

J'ai fait tous les jobs possibles,
Plombier, pute et belle fille.

J'ai sodomisé un louveteau
Avec le manche d'un marteau.

the politics of being born

- Martine Francke
As I perhaps clumsily indicated in my last post, one risks falling under the spell of a parergonal logic in trying to “frame” a text, to give it a frame, to approach it from a frame. For from the start, the frame has a fatal tendency to bilocate within the frame. In this particular case, the frame is a woman – who provides the frame for the actual content of the phrase from Rousseau, “all men are born to be free…”, about which the Consolatio dialogue turns. The woman is both the support, the constitution and condition of that birth, and what is marginalized by that particular freedom. Marie d’Agoult in her Histoire provides a very good (and neglected) overview of feminist history from the French revolution to 1848 –giving due credit to figures who were supposedly re-discovered by the feminists of the 1970s, like Olympe des Gouges.

“The Revolution, after having provoked them [women] to appear on the political scene, threw them back into the shadows, on 9 thermidor, without having provided essential changes in their social condition. However the constitutional assembly, not content to render them a striking homage in entrusting the “reserve of the Constitution to the vigilance of wives and mothers” had sensibly ameliorated their fate in the family in establishing the equal sharing of goods and abolishing the perpetuity of monastic vows. The legislative assembly thought they were doing even more by legalizing divorce. But in this as well the legislators were occupied solely with women of the wealthy class. The questions of equal division of goods, of perpetual vows and of indissoluble ties did not touch the daughter of the people, for she did not expect inheritances, her family had no interest in pushing her into a convent, and the uniformity of the habits of her industrious life retained her naturally, without causing her to suffer, in the one matrimonial tie. The ideas which interested the generality of women and their rights in all social situations were not treated again after the long silence of the Empire and the Restoration than by the schools of Saint Simon and of Fourier.” (II, 33)

This is a beautiful passage, both for what it recognizes and its rather destabilizing ultra gesture. The latter became more common in leftist discourse in the 20th century, when, due to the reactionary family policy of Stalinism, the cry went forward that, as d’Agoult puts it here, the women of the people were wholly uninterested in the bourgeois topics of feminism. The game, by that time, was all about suspending indefinitely the cultural revolution (which was frivolous) while pursuing the economic and political revolution (which was serious). Seriousness is a politically charged social thematic – and alas, an all too little investigated one. However, at the time d’Agoult was writing, the sinister career of this theme was well in the future. Instead, one has to credit d’Agoult with the perception that the unity of “women” could easily disguise the social disunity of “women”. That the “long silence” is broken by the ‘utopians” – oh, this is such a rich topic, and one with such bearing on the liberal-radical alienation from the happiness culture, that I can hardly do it justice here. I’ll just point to it.

And so let us leap, following the method of the grasshopper rather than that of the scholarly ant, back to our Herzen text and end this post with a quote from the doctor:

“Did you ever think what the words, ‘man is born to be free’ mean? I shall interpret them for you. They mean, ‘man is born to be a beast’ – no more. Take a drove of wild horses – complete freedom and equal rights, the most complete communism; but development is impossible. Salvery is the first step to civilization. For development it is incumbent that some shall be far better off and others far worse. It is then that the former can advance at the expense of the latter. Nature spares nothing for development. To her man is an animal with an extraordinarily well developed brain: herein lies his power. Man did not feel in himself the agility of the tiger or the strength of the lion. He was remarkable neither for his muscles nor for especially keen senses; but he evinced a world of cunning, a host of humble qualities which, coupled with his natural tendency to live in communities, brought him to the initial step of social life. Bear in mind that man is fond of obeying; he always seeks something to lean upon, or to hid behind. He lacks the proud self-sufficiency of the beast of prey. He grows up subjugated by the family and the tribe. The more involved and tight the knot of social life became, the deeper people sank into slavery. They were oppressed by religion, which played on their fears, and by the tribal chiefs who played on tradition. There is not an animal, but one from the ‘kind corrupted by man,’ as Byron called domestic animals, that would be able to stand the strain of human relations. The wolf devours the lamb because it is hungry and became the lamb is weaker; but the wolf does not demand slavery from the lamb, nor does the lamb submit to him. It protests by bleating and running away. Into the wildly independent and self-sufficient world of the animals man has introduced an element of personal loyalty, the element of Caliban, and it is owing to this that a Prospero could appear.” (426)

more thoughts on women and doctors

Another story, another tale of substitutions.

Amie’s citing of Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus in the comments of my last post made me think about the difficulty of trying to “frame” my description of Herzen’s Consolatio when the frame is bigger than the picture. But this is not an unusual situation – indeed, though we speak of frames with the image in our mind of those ornamental strips of wood which form a square in which a picture is placed, the analogy rarely works like that when dealing with concepts and themes. For the frame is the world itself, and we must take ‘frame’ in a different, older sense: as the OED puts it, rather diffusely, “The manner or method of framing; construction, structure; constitution, nature…” Etymologically, the word is related to “from” – a root meaning advancement. The unstoppable growth of frames is, indeed, a kind of demented advancement – what begins as a boundary becomes an endless frontier.

If, as I am going to imagine it, there is a vibe in Herzen that comes from therapeutic nihilism, and a likeness of his doctor to one of France’s most prominent radicals, Raspail, there is also a vibe in that struggling dyad, the woman and the doctor. A very nineteenth century vibe, indeed. Modern historians – Angus McLaren and Thomas Laquer, for instance – in telling the story of the medicalization of the female body in the nineteenth century re-use a substitution trope that comes from the nineteenth century: the doctor replaces the priest. McLaren writes:

“when nineteenth-century observers declared “the doctor is replacing the priest” they were almost always referring to the new role assumed by medicine on the terrain previously dominated by the dictates of religion – the area of sex and the family.” (McLaren 1975:39) Now how exactly a replacement like that works – what the area is that is replaced, this hole inside the frame – is relevant not just to the politics of projection which we have been following, but to the interior of the human limit – the defining traits of the Other – that has served as one of our parameter for defining the rise of the material culture. The other within, the patient within, the invalid within the house, the bed, the nation, was becoming, archetypally, the Woman. Michelet, with whom Herzen was friendly, proclaimed, famously, in L’amour that “la femme est une malade.” “She seems destined to pain; thus suffering to be formed, suffering every month, suffering to be a woman…” Thomas Laqueur noted that it was in the 1840s that obstetricians developed a better sense of the menstrual cycle (there had been a medical theory that menses was caused by lasciviousness), building on von Baer’s demonstration of an egg in the fallopian tube of a dog:

“In the novelistic style that characterizes so much early nineteenth-century scientific reporting, Theodor L.W. Bischoff tells his reader that on 18 and 19 December 1843 he noted tat a large bitch in his possession had begun to go into heat. On the 19th he allowed her contact with a male dog, but she refused its attentions. He kept her securely imprisoned for two more days and then brought on the male dog again; this time she was interested but the animals were separated before coition could take place. At ten o’clock two days later, i.e., on the morning of the 23rd, he cut out her left ovary and fallopian tubes and carefully closed the wood. The Graafian follicles in the excised ovary were swollen but not yet burst. Five days later he killed the dog and found in the remaining ovary four developing corpus lutei.

Laquer points out that F.A. Pouchet, a famous doctor (and friend of Michelet) considered the discover that ovulation occurs independently of coition so important that “he formulated it as his “fifth and critical law of reproductive biology.” (Laqueur 1987: 26) As Laqueur points out, this shifted the medical identity of women from the vagina to the ovaries. And Emily Martin has pointed to the persistence of feminine and masculine cultural archetypes in the representation of the egg and the sperm up to the present day.

The thematic of alienation in the liberal and radical marginals begins with a turn in the interpretation of the structure of the relationship between the governors and the governed. The enlightenment notion that the bond between the people and the state consists in some relationship to collective happiness was not a direct hit on the old order – rather, a conservative view of this notion is that happiness is the equivalent of the stability given by a fixed order of dependence. Georg Foster had compared this to an order that kept the people in the stage of larvae – arrested in their development. This metaphoric of development is, of course, a biologic metaphoric. It is taken, ultimately, from embryology. Just as the embryo develops into a human in the womb, the people would develop into perfected humans in the womb of the revolutionary state – or, in the liberal version, in a state that allowed for a culture of the liberated imagination. The oddity of this metaphoric is that, although it is taken from the woman’s body, the woman in the story seems to be backed further and further away from the center. In this, she becomes a frame, a bracket, a support.

I'll return to this in another post

doctors and women

- Ann Svenson, untitled

It was around 1848 that Joseph Dietl, a doctor in Vienna, first used the phrase “therapeutic nihilism.” It was an attitude that had been developing in the medical school of the University of Vienna, a part of the extreme positivist reaction to the feverish cosmic analogies of the romantics. According to the circle in which Dietl taught, medical science was caught between an increasingly sophisticated ability to diagnose and the growing realization that all traditional therapies, everything in the doctor’s toolkit, had no scientific grounding. In a sense, medicine still oscillates today between the idea that cures come as a result of understanding causes and the idea that one should just empirically test to see if something cures. Penicillin, to use one famous example, was developed in the absence of a theory about why it should work. But therapeutic nihilism stood at the positivistic extreme: nature, in this view, was the only cure. The result was, curiously, that Vienna’s medical school became more and more famous, and Vienna’s hospitals became more and more disgraceful.

Herzen took classes at Moscow University in Physics, but he was certainly interested in medicine, and knew members of the medical faculty. Was he aware of what was happening in Vienna? In France, medical journals after 1860 use the term nihilisme therapeutique to refer to practices like that of Laennec’s, in the 1820s, with regard to tuberculosis. The Journal de médecine, de chirurgie et de pharmacology refers to the “doctrines sustained successively by Broussais, Schoenlien, Heusinger, Rokitansky and Lebert remained sterile in therapy, but continued to tranquilly play their role in the program of studies of our faculties of medicine under the determination, ‘pure medical science’, with which therapy conserved only a distant tie.” Lebert founded a group dedicated to the synthesis of biology and medicine in 1848 – Rokitansky was the head of Vienna’s Medical school – and Broussais was one of the most famous doctors in the 1840s.

The idea of pure medical science is, in a sense, like the idea of creating a pure science to observe the political physiognomy of a society – or the cultural physiognomy. The great master of the diagnostic metaphor in nineteenth century philosophy is Nietzsche, who, as well, considered a form of nihilism to be the great European disease. A disease of heredity:

“This innocence between opposites, this good conscience in the lie is… modern par excellence, it is almost definitive of modernity. The modern person presents, biologically, a contradiction of values, he sits between two stools, in one breath he says yes and no… we have counter knowing, counter wills, counter values, counter formulas, counter morals of opposed heredity in the body… A diagnostic of the modern soul – where should it begin? With a resolute incision in this contradictoriness of instincts, with the leaching out of its opposite values.” - Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner

All of which brings us back to the fact that a doctor is, if we can trust Aileen Kelly, voicing Herzen’s views in From the Other Shore, and, in particular, in the dialogue we are interested in, Consolatio. And on the other side of the doctor? A woman. Who we need to trace, too, who we need to look at in terms of this dyad, the woman/doctor, which turns up again and again in the nineteenth century – until we get to Freud’s wonderful case histories.

In fact, the strongest evidence that the doctor in question is influenced by therapeutic nihilism is a story he tells which, again, concerns a woman.

the revolution of the intellectuals?

Although the French revolution of 1848 was incessantly put in terms of the French revolution of 1789 by its participants, it was, in that very act, necessarily different than 1789. It is to that self-consciousness Marx alludes with the famous bon mot about farce; it was also the reason a Whig historian of the 20th century, Lewis Namier, could say that 1848 was the revolution of the intellectuals. Of course, this view is considered much too idealistic by more sociologically inclined historians. What seems true, however, is that in 1848, for reasons that remain unclear, that floating sector of intellectuals and the more easily identified sector of the working class interpenetrated for one startling moment. A wall fell, a sort of pentacost of tongues broke out in the streets. Most observers claim that, in France at least, the revolution came as a stunning surprise. Mark Traugott, who has studied the worker’s movement of 1848, wrote that “although in retrospect it was easy to appreciate how the ground had been prepared by the calamitous economic crisis that began in 1845-1846 and by the political reform movement launched in 1847, the February Revolution appeared to stun even those best apprised of the French situation” – and here he references Tocqueville. Traugott writes, further: ‘It is, in part, this contrast between the apparent unanimity of the population’s response and the failure of contemporary observers to anticipate the insurrection’s outbreak that accounts for the fascination of the February Days to students of revolutionary movements.” (1988)

Herzen’s analysis of the revolution and its failure is not couched on the level of class interest, as Marx’s analysis is. Rather, Herzen surveys the revolutionary “spirit” – the community mood – of those activists who propagandized and organized for the revolution. Herzen, who watches the revolution in both France and Italy from the standpoint of a Russian exile, correctly divines that one cannot dismiss the link between the intellectual and the people and successfully understand the events that unfolded in 1848 and 1849. The revolution of 1848 was one of those rare moment in which history as the philosopher views it and history as it is made by the people overlapped.

For this reason, I think his choice of his “spokesman” in From the Other shore is important. As I’ve mentioned, there is some controversy over what Herzen is doing in the dialogues that alternate with reports and reflections in the book. Aileen Kelly, who surely knows Herzen better than anyone writing in English, claims that we can easily see through the character of the doctor in Consolatio to the author – here Herzen is saying what he thinks. And if we identify the doctor with the radical sceptic in all the dialogues, we have this fictional character playing the traditional role, in a philosophical dialogue, of the one who expresses the author’s opinion. Morson, who is one of the American champions of Bakhtin, disagrees, and thinks that the dialogue form is evidence for the dialogic thought.

Herzen had a curious way of expressing his thoughts not in treatises or lectures – although he gave some of them – but, more commonly, in memoirs and reports on the news, in letters, in stories, and in the phantasmagoria of From the Other Shore. I think there is a reason that he chose to write in such a way as to mark the occasion of the writing – which is what a letter, a report, a conversation does. He wanted to keep a close hold on the ephemeral, to use it as a guard against the power of conceptual rapture.

If this is his point, then it is appropriate that the man who, in From the Other Shore, ‘represents’ Herzen is a doctor. There’s something teasing about that doctor, after all. Many of his traits – his radical skepticism, his disengagement from the forms of revolutionary politics and sympathies with it - fit like a glove one of the great radicals of 1848 – Francois-Vincent Raspail. Raspail was a figure after Herzen’s own liberty seeking heart. For instance, he refused to get a medical degree, even though he was generally known as a great doctor; hauled into court for practicing without a license, he still refused to get one because he refused to grant authority to the medical institutions of Louis-Philippe’s France. Norma Weiner, his biographer, points out that he became extremely wealthy by writing and printing one the Manuel annuaire de la sante. It was translated into Spanish, English, German and Italian and sold at an astonishing clip, becoming one of the century’s best sellers. (Weiner, 1959: 156) Becoming independently wealthy, he could indulge in his penchant for radical politics. Madame Agoult, who must have known him, pens a good portrait of him in her history of the 1848 revolution:

“Although his doctrines, strongly bound up in a system of pantheistic philosophy, tended to a radical communism and he considered the right of property as an illusion of amour-propre, he lifted his voice on all occasions against the thought of an immediate and violent reform: he fought against the agrarian law, that he called a chimera of restitution, an absurd idea. “Those who dream of social reform by suddenly upsetting property,” he said, “would not only be guilty; they would be insane; they would be savages who take revenge on their enemies by burning their own harvests, and who crown with their own death the success of a stupid vengeance. The equality of rights is an immoveable law, the equality of goods will not last for more than two hours.”

What he had of absolute in the expression of even his more wise ideas, his shadowy character, his austerity isolated Raspail from parties and factions. He excercized a personal ascendancy over the population of the quarters. His medical knowledge put him in the position of effectively helping, at every time of day, the injuries and sufferings that the rhetoricians of the clubs contented themselves with painting and that the ambitious were trying to exploit; but it was a moral isolated action, secretly envied and wrong footed by the chiefs of the party, and which never took the initiative in the revolutionary movement. One… never saw M. Raspail accompanied but by obscure soldiers of democracy.” The radicals of the government, MM. Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, judged him dangerous. M. Caussidiere, to whom he went on the day he was installed to see the registers of the police and find out the names of those who had betrayed him in the secret societies, refused him. A few days afterwards, M. Raspail’s paper, L’ami du people, was taken out of the hands of its paper boys and torn up by a troupe of students to whom they had made Raspail’s name suspect. The rumor floated, nobody knew how, that Raspail preached the extermination of the rich, like Marat.” (V.2, 9-10 – my translation)

...

towards the republic of Cocagne

“Man is, of course, at home in history, but from your words one could infer that he is only a guest of nature’s as though there were a stone wall between nature and history. It seems to me that he is at home in both, but not dominant in either… In history man labours under the delusion that he is unhampered and free to do whatever he chooses. All this is the bitter trace of dualism which has long made us see double and waver between two optical illusions. Though dualism has long lost its crudeness, it lingers inconspicuously in our hearts. Our language, our fundamental conceptions, become natural out of habit and repetition, obstruct the truth. Had we not know, from the age of five, that history and nature are two different things, we would have no difficulty in understanding that the evolution of nature passes imperceptibly into the evolution of man, that these are two chapters of a single novel, two phases of a single process, far removed from one another at their perimeters, but very close at the centre.” (394)

Herzen was of a generation of Russian writers who all came under the influence of the romantic philosophers, Schelling and Hegel. In Herzen’s case, he undertook a long therapy after immersion in the romantics, with the goal of ridding himself of idealism of any kind. It is interesting to compare Herzen in this respect to Marx. The latter’s reading in 18th century materialism gave him the ground plan for countering idealism as a mode of historical understanding, even if Marx astutely understood that the old fashioned materialism, which had hardened in the shell of an outmoded sensualism, collapses as an explanation for society unless one can instill into it some dynamic. As all the world well knows, for this, he turned to Hegel’s dialectics. Herzen did not move towards materialism, which for him would have meant returning to the fashions of the court of Catherine the Great. Rather, he developed the idea of folding history into nature and nature into history, a thematic that has had a long life in Russian thought. Herzen was impressed by the Spinozan principle that existence was always extreme – that is, that there is no gradation in what exists, but that what exists exists on its extremest edge – and he incorporates this idea into his view of progress in history and the perfection of man. The result was that Herzen’s philosophy of nature and history contains a continual tension between the idea of the extreme – an idea that results of viewing politics in terms of the morphology of an organism, with no real normative dimension – and the organic metaphor, in which a society or movement grows old and weak, or, on the contrary, appears young and fresh. Only under the latter analogies was it possible to talk about progress and perfection. And, remember, Herzen was at the core a radical – he of course wanted to overthrow both the old order of autocracy and the new order of the bourgeoisie. Yet, here’s the rub: if we apply the rule that all that exists exists as much as it possibly can, there is, in fact, no weakness nor strength. There is, absolutely, no progress. Both the young and the old exist as much as they can exist. Only from the viewpoint of the young are the old weak, and only from the point of view of the old are the young strong.
…
What came of age in 1848 were the twin impulses of the French revolution, aptly summed up in one of those marvelous phrases that entered into the underhistory of Europe’s intellectual life, Danton’s statement about St. Just:
“Je n’aime pas cet extravagant. Il veut apporter à la France une république de Sparte, et c’est un république de Cocagne qu’il nous faut.”
It is a Republic of Cocagne that we need. And if, after all, material conditions make the man, why not? The task of perfection can be laid aside, indeed, as an extravagance… Fastforwarding to the Cold War era, the doctrine that perfection was pernicious became one of the ideological building blocks for anti-communism and the shadow of anti-communism, cast back all the way to 1793. For, by cleverly pretending that the old order and its atrocities never existed (and while the September massacres were trotted out by the Furet circle around Debats as often as possible, as crocodile tears were shed over the Vendee, not a peep was heard about Saint-Domingue, or about famine and massacre in the 1760s – just as the global sins of the capitalist order, the famines from Ireland to India, also disappeared at this time from the historical record, poof), one could easily pretend that virtue leads to totalitarianism. How much better to roll about in capitalist Cocagne!

ps- I ran across an anecdote in Marie d'Agoult's Histoire de la Revolution de 1848 that beautifully illustrates the contrast between Sparta and Cocagne. According to d'Agoult, when the King fled, the populace overran the palace. Later, crowds met the Royal Guard, who were confused as to what was going on. The crowd, having loosened up with wine, embraced the Guard. And amongst the crowd, there were people carrying spikes and bayonets - but unlike 1789, on these spikes and bayonets were impaled not the heads of royalist officers, but sides of ham and beef. The raid on the palace had concentrated particularly on the royal kitchens.

note on the the calendar as a prison

There’s a certain magical attachment in history to years. A year serves not only as an organizing principle, but also as a spell – it gathers around itself a host of connotations, and soon comes to stand for those connotations. Yet, what would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure. These are the crutches of the historian, according to the philosophical historian. Instead, a philosophical history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of history. In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary.

On the other hand, perhaps, under the mask of the arbitrary, there lurks the new, a moment of some kind that breaks absolutely with the absolute.

Now, in the case of understanding the history of the social meanings given to the passions, there are two opposite, guiding assumptions you can make. You can either assume that what is felt –affection, the feeling-mood, the emotion, whatever we are going to call this difficult feeling – is always the same - that is, there are no new emotions – and that what one is dealing with in the before-after framework is simply new codes or forms into which the emotions are coaxed. Or you can assume that an emotion can be new. The latter, you might think, is ruled out by neurology. I’d argue, however, that neurology can merely rely on mapping the brain according to the subject’s own interpretations of activity, and, in general, the emotional labels at hand for the neurologist. Here is where the term “mapping” is misleading – the mapmaker can easily map a new river or mountain or island – but the neurologist doesn’t have enough information to know what would be “new” about some neurological event. The neurologist can induce brain activity that he or she has never observed before, but whether this new activity is simply the way the brain has always operated, and is being observed now for the first time, or whether this is really new activity – we do not have enough of a concrete sense about the relationship between these brain activities and their cognitive or affective outputs to say. On the ordinary level, we are inclined to think that people can have new thoughts, but not new feelings. I can discover a truth about energy, but I can’t discover a new feeling that is a little like love and a little like sadness. Rather, I am just mixing together my primary emotions. Why should this be so, though?

In a history of the sentiments, or, rather, in most histories of the sentiments, what is at stake is not new emotions, or the extinction of old ones. Rather, it is on the level of the intersubjective, the level of the expression of emotion, that we find our changes, our before and afters. However, it is easy to shift from the intersubjective to the subjective – to speak, for instance, of love being “invented”. After all, the codes and forms in which emotion is expressed should have an influence on the persons who fall under these codes and forms.

By this route – by looking at how codes and forms gain the upper hand – we can return to chronology, we can snap together dates and doings. But it is always approximate, always relative to the domination, within a society, of codes and forms. And how those codes and forms displace others is not an easy story to tell, nor is it easy to confirm that these things are happening.

Iran

After Louis Napoleon had finally crushed any hope for revolution in France, Herzen published a letter – which he included as his fourteenth letter in the Letters from France and Italy – in which he draws some conclusions about the morphology of revolution. Some of his observations seem particularly applicable to Iran – which is no surprise. As Herzen observed, revolution no longer has a definite place, but, like a drop of mercury in a heated pan, jumps from one place to another. I found this passage pertinent – as pertinent as a knife in the heart:

“It has at last fallen into ruin, that decrepit world which survived its own self [this sounds much better in French: Il s’est enfin écroulé, ce monde décrepit qui s’était survècu a lui même] , which dissolved itself, which divided into two opposing principles, clever world, which at last came to lying and the confusion of all ideas, to pussilanimous concessions, which was arrested before impossible combinations. Everything that this world had reconstructed of the past, everything that it had painted freshly on varnished wood, all the productions of its old age second childhood – all this has fallen into ruin like a house of cards. There are no more confused reticences sustaining false hopes. The black night that one awaited has come – we advance with small steps towards the morning.”

Herzen’s vision was cleared by being in exile from one decrepit world – my vision is clouded by being part of a world that is in the midst of surviving itself as it faces the consequences of its own impossible economic combinations, its consumer society feudalism. But my eyes are clear enough to see that perception does not bring into being the nature of things. The U.S. establishment has settled it among themselves that the reformers were aiming at Americanizing Iran; for the U.S. establishment firmly believes in the Americanization of our enemies, while quietly supporting the non-Americanization of our friends. Thus, the outpouring for the demonstrators who have been killed in Teheran and Isfahan, and the turning away from the inhabitants of Gaza who, a mere six months ago, were treated to a terror war and died in their hundreds. In its search for comments from the “Arab” world, the New York Times published a Syrian activist, Rime Allaf, who spoke the obvious:

“Images like the distressing video immortalizing Neda Agha-Soltan as she lay dying in Tehran, inexplicably murdered, have also triggered conflicting emotions and sad questions on whether she died in vain. With so many people not actively espousing the position of any side, reluctant to shake a status quo, which, for all its problems, remains safer than the alternatives seen from Iraq to Afghanistan, the burden of experience is heavy. Dissent of any kind — even mild civil disobedience — has been brutally repressed throughout the Arab world replete with its own religious rulings, kangaroo courts and sham elections.
To add insult to injury, not only has people’s self-determination never received the backing of the international community, it has also been suppressed with the blessing of the world’s superpowers, eager to keep friendly regimes in power.
This is perhaps why Arab reactions to Iranians’ turmoil have been somewhat subdued. If the Iranians are so strongly supported in their quest for freedom, they wonder, why have Arabs’ own struggles been ignored, their own suffering been dismissed and their own Nedas been nameless? Why were Arabs’ own cries invoking God incessantly reported, in English, as calls to “Allah” in a perceived attempt to further alienate them, as if they believed in a different god, while Iranian cries of “Allahu akbar” have been correctly translated as “God is great” and repeated in unison by twitterers around the world?
With the wounds of Israel’s war on Gaza still open, many Arabs are particularly stunned that the indifference with which Palestinians deaths were received has turned into an international solidarity campaign for Iranians throwing rocks at their oppressors and shouting “we have become Palestine.”

Just as Americans look for Americanization to end the tv show dramas of other people’s history, the left looks everywhere, now, to see its own image. It is the narcissism of a corpse. The first question of a healthy political movement is – how do we support emancipation? The first question of a sick political movement is: what do we, as a movement, feel about supporting emancipation? My own answer to that is: fuck you. Those who have to enroll their immediate responses to the world in some baroque and pointless schemata have deadened the very nerve of politics.

Who can predict what happens next in Iran? We see the absolute dark, but it is not us, not LI, who must make the small steps towards morning. In relation to the U.S., we stand as we have always stood: abolish the sanction regime, recognize reality. This step should have been taken in 1990 – by not taking it, the U.S. has stripped itself of credibility and the instruments that could support those having to take the small steps. The demonstrations were a blow against the corruption of the current Iranian regime, but also a blow against the monstrous mechanism that keep blindly at work in the Middle East, spinning oil into blood.

Amie sent me a video and a poem by Forough Farrokhzad: The Wind will carry us. She suggested I link it, in honor of Neda. The link contains the words of the poem, which begins:

“In my small night, ah
the wind has a date with the leaves of the trees
in my small night there is agony of destruction
listen
do you hear the darkness blowing?
I look upon this bliss as a stranger
I am addicted to my despair.”

How many have become addicted to despair! Me, something hollers within. How about me! However, I looked around and found, as well, a more streetwise ballad by Kiosk, Eshgh e Sorat. It is pretty fantastic. The video was made by Ahmad Kiorastami, who talks a bit about it here.

Where does a revolution happen?

-photo by Gilles Peress


One possibility is that it happens inside, in the spirits of the people. But this is a frustrating notion to the philosopher – as frustrating as it would be to a bank robber to be handed a safe with all the money in it, and no combination to open it.

As we noted with Georg Forster, the enlightenment project, which bound the governors to the governed through happiness, immediately creates a set of new problems. One of those problems is posed by the claim that the collective happiness was, indeed, achieved in the old order. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – strong indication that man prefers chains. Inequality, far from leading to happiness, is central to the way homo hierarchicus views the world.

But already the answer to the puzzle, here, had made its way into the enlightened progressive consciousness. The key was in human perfectibility. The old order’s original sin was in creating a system that forever blocked human perfectibility – and in this way, crushed the possibility of the future enjoyment of all of our qualities.

If we take this position, practically, then – the revolutionary says - we should strive to blow up the impediments to future delight. And if that means establishing, for a transitory moment, a political organization in which the governors, members of a revolutionary party, are incomparably more unequal to the governed, so be it. For only by a truly sudden blow can one penetrate into the heart where the chains are forged and stop it at this business. Centuries of ingrained comformism and submission must be liquidated.

But – if we are still philosophers – this solution leaves us uneasy. Not simply because of its betrayal of democracy, but rather, for its too easy assumption about interiority. It is here that Hoffmann’s stories, with their doppelgangers, have the effect of … making the political uncanny. Once granted that man projects, and one can imagine the extension of projection into the political sphere quite easily. That snarling little changeling, Little Zaches, might have gained his powers from a fairy and lost them to a magician – but his transit through the state parallels the career of many politicians. And, in fact, many political and economic systems have so learned to manipulate and broadcast projection, used the supposedly freeing techniques of enlightenment to devise ever cleverer chains, that the philosopher can sometimes spend all his or her time dodging – retreat to a perpetual round of critique.

Herzen, witness to the brief rise and ugly fall of the revolution of 1848 and a reader of the ‘reactionary’ Hoffmann, responds to these problems by splitting his responses, allocating roles in the series of monologues and dialogues that make up a book intended as a gift to the future – a gift to his son. Who, at the time of the writing, is too young to read. But when he could read – or, as we know actually happened, when Herzen’s daughter read, for his daughter was his real executor – was he or she supposed to know which side Herzen was on? Because the dialogues don’t place the reader in the easy position of seeing through the characters to Herzen’s side – the reporter, the doctor, the exile in the beginning dialogue, all seem to carry the author’s warmth; but that warmth also extends to the romantic, the woman who admires Rousseau, and to a certain tendency in the monologues that is anything but cool and diagnostic. There is a Hoffmann-esque zigzag here – a streak of Gogol in Herzen.

You think you know me
that's your trouble
Never fall in love with a body double... jamais

of what is the statue guilty, your honor?

It's a wicked life, but what the hell
Everybody's got to eat



Around March 4, 1848, Alexandre Dumas wrote a public letter Emile de Girardin, the editor of the newspaper, The Press:

‘Yesterday, I walked across the court of the Louvre and I saw, with astonishment, that the statue of the duc D’Orleans was no longer on his pedestal.

I asked if it was the people who had knocked him over; they told me that it was the governor of the Louvre that had had him taken off.

Why this? From whence comes this prescription that digs into the graveyard?”

The Prince - the Duc D'Orleans - was a famously liberal patron of the arts. Among the artists he supported was Delacroix. He was a friend of Hugo and Dumas. And he'd fled with the rest of the royal court in February.

After recounting an anecdote about the disagreement between the Duc and the King, Dumas continues:

“The people, this people who are always just and intelligent, knew this like us, and, like us, understood it. You can go to the Tuilleries and see that the only rooms respected by the people are those of M. le duc d’Orleans; why thus be more severe than the people towards that poor prince, who has the happiness to no longer belong anywhere except to history?

The future is that block of marble that the events can chisel as they will; the past is that bronze statue tossed into the mould of eternity.

You cannot do anything against the man who no longer exists.”

Dumas ended with a flourish:
“The republic of 1848 is strong enough, I believe, to consecrate that sublime anomaly of a prince remaining standing on his pedestal in face of a royalty falling from the heights of its throne.” (Mes betes, p. 238 – my translation)

Freud supposedly said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But a statue is never just a statue – as is easily shown in world history. One easy way to tell if a revolution has arrived in a given place is: what is the casualty count of the statuary?

Dumas was a violent republican who tried to raise a troupe to go to Paris to support the workers. But, as he explains in My animals, his was a politics of temperament:

“Composed of a double element, aristocratic and popular - the former by my father, the latter by my mother – nobody other than me unites in such a high degree in a single heart the respectful admiration for all that is great, and the tender and profound sympathy for all who are badly off… I have a cult for those I have known and loved in misfortune, and I don’t forget them, unless they have since become powerful and happy; thus, no fallen grandeur passes before me that I don’t salute, and no merit extends its hand to me that I don’t shake it. It is when the whole world seems to have forgotten those who are no longer there that, like an importunate echo of the past, I cry their name outloud.” (239)

Modern political theory warns about nothing so consistently as it does against adventurism. According to the adventure-ist theory, one must be logical – and logic has no worse enemy than mercy, which is whimsical, and points to a whimsical attitude - an aristocratic attitude - towards the world. The political system can, according to this view, encounter and integrate chance - which is what an election is - but not whimsy. Chance, it should be said, is not pure chance, but chance as it has been determined by parties. Of course, the question that hovers over the whole political system is - where did the judges come from? the men of affairs? the ranks? the institutions? Track their courses, and - the adventurer might reply - one finds not an evolution from logical principles, but a concantination of chance pathways. Adventure is at the root of it.

From the adventurers point of view, it is not that the new governor's are finally condemning old vices in the symbolic personage of statues. Rather, they can't stand the cold, measured gaze of the past.

Herzen catches this dichotomy too – it is what makes From the Other Shore such a torn and tearing text. His analysis of what happened in 1848 is, as well, an analysis of the revolutionary consciousness – it is as if he is tracking the interior history of the spirit, and the exterior history of events. Dumas, traversing the court of the Louvre, sees immediately the horror that befalls a culture in which a bureaucrat, with a flick of a pen, can condemn a statue to death. Herzen sees the horror that can befall a person who cannot sign that death warrant:

“I shall make my way, a spiritual beggar, through the world, my childish hopes and adolescent aspirations uprooted. Let them all appear before the court of incorruptible reason.

Man houses a permanent revolutionary tribunal within himself, an implacable Fouquier-Tinville, and even a guillotine. Sometimes judges fall asleep, the guillotine rusts, the fals notions, outdated romantic and feeble, come to life and make themselves at home, when all of a sudden some terrific blow rouses the heedless judge and the dozing executioner, and then comes the savage retribution for the slightest concession, the slightest mercy or pity shown leads back to the past and leaves the chains intact.” (373)

woe betide those who forgive such moments

“I don’t pity them. For, I confess it madam, I differ of little from your taste in political colors; I find pink (rose) charming, when it is transformed into a proper name; I find it infinitely lovable to perceive it on a pretty face like yours; but in opinions, I confess, I find it repulsive (je le repousse). Continue, then, madame, I pray you, to be pink in complexion and name, but not in politics.” – Alexander Tocqueville, letter to Rose Margaret Phillimore, 30 December, 1848.

It is interesting, ghoulishly interesting, to be writing about Herzen’s reaction to the collapse of the revolution of 1848 on the day that the Iranian military disperses protests in Teheran. From the Other Shore strikes deep chords – and one of them is surely about the meaning of oligarchic reaction. In many ways, Ahmadinejad’s Republic resembles that of Louis Phillipe - vast fortunes are made by shady men, sieved off the public and become part of the structure of rot. At a certain point, hazard, in the form of an election, cannot be tolerated. And it isn’t. The people wake up to the fact that the rules of the game changed when they were asleep.

Herzen, of course, throbbed with the revolution that seemed to promise so much when it took Paris and crumbled all the old structures in February, 1848. By the end of the year, the new structures – especially the attempt by the state to simply employ people in the ateliers nationales, which was the breaking point for the liberals – had been in turn smashed. Tocqueville was, as in that rather disgusting letter to his friend, happy about the smashing, and had some hand in putting General Cavaignac in charge of the worker massacres.

Herzen does not sketch the details of the fight – rather, his point is to give an impression of Paris and himself during this time. Here is how he describes what happened:

The liberals dallied and jested with the idea of revolution until they joked themselves into February 24. The popular hurricane carried them to the top of the belfry, whence they could see where they were going and leading others. And the chasm they saw before them made them blanch for they saw that not only that wh8ich they had regarded as prejudice was tumbling but all the rest as well, the things they had regarded as true and eternal. So frightened were they that some of them clutched at the tumbling walls while others halted midway, remorsefully assuring all passers-by that this was not at all what they had wanted. And thus the very people who proclaimed the republic came to be the hangmen of freedom.”

When the liberals in the government gave untrammeled reign to the White terror in order to uproot the Parisian proletariat, Herzen was a witness. His account of this is not famous in the English speaking world, so I will quote some of it. But I want to end this post – on this dark day – with this:

“On the evening of June 26, after the victory of the National over Paris, we heard salvoes with brief, regular intervals between them… We glanced at each other; everybody was green in the face. “These are executions,” we said in unison and looked away. I pressed my forehead to the window-pane. Such moments kindle hatred for a dozen of years, call for life-long vengeance. Woe betide those who forgive such moments!”

A cry that has been uttered millions of times since.

Iran, via IT

Infinite thought posted a guestpost that I am just going to steal for LI. It is a great explanation of what is happening in Iran. Myself, I am too sick at the moment to achieve coherence over any stretch of prose longer than OUUUUUUCHHHHH - I have an ear infection that is making me the world's biggest Beethoven sympathizer.

Here it is:

why are the iranians dreaming again?*



[The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University]

This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.

Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.

In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.

It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).

Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.

Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets...But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.

In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.

There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).

Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.

What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.

While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).

History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?

* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”

the cost of making universal history

Silly fools, it is my glory, for that is where the truth lies…The reason for the Underground is the destruction of our belief in certain general rules. “Nothing is sacred.”
- Dostoevsky, quoted by Aileen Kelly in Irony and Utopia in Herzen and Doestoevsky, the Russian Review,1991.

When the Czar’s police arrested Herzen in 1834, they impounded his papers, including an article on Hoffmann. Many of those papers were lost, but the Hoffmann article eventually was published. In it, Herzen accused Hoffmann of opting for an internal exile to a past that never existed. For Herzen, the perfect Hoffmann anecdote is of the man directing an orchestra in 1812 in Warsaw while Napoleon was invading Russia; Herzen takes a remark he made at the time to mean that he was either ignorant of or indifferent to Napoleon invading Russia.

As I’ve tried to show, this image of Hoffmann, the autistic creepy gnome, is not true. Herzen obviously did not know of Hoffmann’s experience in Dresden, since he couldn't have read Hoffmann's journal - as we can now - and Herzen seems unaware of the essay about the Dresden battlefield. However, Herzen should have known that Hoffmann mounted a fight against political repression as a judge in Berlin in the 1820s that could have landed him in jail. However unfair Herzen's judgment, what is important here is the slant of the criticism, which echoes Heine’s judgment about the second wave of German Romantics. (I get these details from Michel Mervaud's series of articles on Herzen) This was no accident. Just as Hoffmann’s works had an enormous effect on Russian writers – on, most notably, Gogol – Heine’s criticism of what he took to be its political retardation (symptoms: a high degree of fantasy; nostalgia for magic; the elevation of private over public life) also had an effect in Russia.

…

It seems to be Herzen’s fate in the English speaking world that he is taken up partly because he seems like the anti-Marx – possessing Marx’s genius for polemic while holding out for the place of individual genius in this sublunary world. Thus, Tom Stoppard, Isaiah Berlin, and Aileen Kelly have taken up the cudgels for Herzen while tiptoeing around his words in the preface to From the Other Shore: “Better perish with the revolution than seek safety in the alms-house of reaction.”

The problem of Herzen’s reception is partly one of substituting social contexts. Herzen’s social context was the autocracy of Nicholas I, not the autocracy of Brezhnev. Herzen – and Marx, for these writers – are never treated in terms of the history in which they actually existed, one in which, for instance, the Russian empire was instituting the 19th century’s bloodiest European ethnic cleansing: that of the Turkic peoples in the Caucasus; while the English were looking away from the starvation of the Irish and celebrating as providential the depopulation of their neighboring island, a policy combining “providential” famine and civilized laissez faire that was taken to India as well. It is so distressing, these famines and wars, that, for the most part, the liberal Cold war crowd simply forgot them. And in so do, distorted history to such a degree that, since the sixties, our greatest intellectual task has been simply to get that history back. The cost of making universal history – wasn’t that Foucault’s great theme? Deleuze’s? Derrida’s? The dissidents so attacked by the cold war liberal establishment for dissenting from the agreed upon amnesia.

So, this is the lie in Isaiah Berlin’s cold war liberalism. He is a brilliant philosophical historian, one with a true sense of what he called the Counter-enlightenment. However, he is not a trustworthy writer. He does like to hide things behind his back.

Aileen Kelly is less known than Berlin, and may be less capacious. But she is undoubtedly Herzen’s most brilliant advocate in the English speaking world. I want to engage with her image of Herzen a bit in this thread.