More Kierkegaardian notes - for Mr. T.

I’m going to range a bit in these notes.

A. the real paradise

In a footnote to the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard references a theory propounded by F. Baader about the Fall – namely, that the Fall must be seen under the category of temptation. Baader is one of those German thinkers who toil up the back staircase to the Castle, unlike Hegel, and thus is praised for his “usual authority and vigor” – and yet here, Kierkegaard can’t go the extra step with him: “Baader seems to me to have neglected some intermediate elements. To pass from innocence to error by nothing other than the concept of temptation risks giving God, in his relation to man, almost the role of the experimenter, and in this way neglects the intermediary, psychological observation, for after all, the intermediary is concupiscentia.” [Translation from the French translation]

There is, here, an echo – a repetition interrupted. Kierkegaard’s scenario, again and again, consists of two men and one girl. The game is played in two moves, which are allotted to the two men: the first man observes the other man and woman – as Constantin Constantius observes the young man in Repetition. Eve is erased rather quickly in the Concept of Anguish – whereas, for Constantius, the young girl is a kind of “bait” for the young man. In the latter scenario, the young man “falls” for the young woman – in the scenario of the Fall, Adam falls, in a sense, for desire itself. The point for the experimenters is not to elicit a response from the girl, but from the man.

The second move in the game is allotted to the young man – or to Adam, although Adam does not write letters. The young man views the girl under two contrary impulses: to love her, or to flee from her – the latter being, indeed, the essence of the former. The young man in Repetition does not annul the girl – as Eve is erased in the story of the Fall – but he substitutes, for annuling her, fleeing from her. He does not, however, fall into Constantius’ experiment. Remember, Constantius proposes the course of fleeing her by deceiving her into thinking that he – the young man – is actually a libertine. Constantius even finds another girl – a working girl, of course, a shop girl, in a boutique – a milieu Kierkegaard must have known about. Indeed, his mother was, in a way, a shop girl. This erased Eve was supposed to be a decoy upon which the young lover was to – leave no mark. But Constantius’ plan was fouled by the young man’s sudden departure.

So much for a scenario that seems – suddenly – to have appeared, with God as Constantius, at the very beginning of human history, and that keeps lacing itself into and out of Kierkegaard’s works, .

B.
However, this footnote, and the first part of The Concept of Anguish, should also revive in the reader – or at least revives in the not so indefatigable writer of these lines – a memory of the very beginning of this thread. It was a post about Kant, from Kant’s lecture on Anthropology, which I threw in as a curve ball from the left field bleachers – and yes, I scatter my references like iron filings and hope to god that some magnet, some theme, will reveal the rose bloom in the field of force –in this case, the field that consists of the culture of happiness. I am operating with the biggest magnets.

Here, again, is the quotation from Kant.

“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.”

C. The notes for the reply to Heiberg.

They always come in pairs. Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire. Heiberg and Kierkegaard. Wagner and Nietzsche. Goethe and Kleist. Snake eyes. One’s special, one’s irreplaceable misunderstander.

When JL Heiberg published his review of Repetition, Kierkegaard, naturally sharp-eyed about his own work, noticed that Heiberg most likely didn’t read past page 40 – oh, one gets sensitive about these things after you publish a bit, you read not simply with your eyes, but with your nervous system! – and that his remarks about repetition were almost heaven sent – the purest platitudinous fool’s gold from the bourgeois heart. As for instance in this passage:

“Repetition that is not mediated through subjectivity into something higher than itself is boring and devoid of spirit.” And this: “The author, who was merely seeking repetition, should not have repeated his journey to Berlin. On the other hand, the repetition of reading a book… can heighten and in a way surpass the first impression, because one thereby immerses oneself more deeply in the object and appropriates it more inwardly.” [From Soren Kierkegaard: Social and political philosophy, 92]

However, although Kierkegaard replied in his papers, he never published the reply in his lifetime. Luckily, the Hong translation of Repetition includes the whole lot.

I will fasten upon one passage.

First, one has to note that the entire reply is traversed by an irritation that amounts to the thought underneath the thought. It is not unimportant, this irritation – no, it is highly characteristic of the aliens to the happiness culture. That alienation is the result of a process – of a long discipline in creating in oneself a perpetually thinking sensitivity, something contrary to the long discipline in dulling the senses that is the circulation worker’s way of getting through the day. Kierkegaard was never a clerk, but he was the son of a man who started out as a clerk, and he has the soul of a clerk who casts everything off – who allows himself, like Bartleby, to experience time running out. Time running out is the special province of clerks.

Kierkegaard didn’t publish these notes, as I say, because … well, as any author knows, to go back and explain your text is to kill it and then offer yourself as the chief mourner at its wake. And the old rule applies: the corpse bleeds in the presence of the murderer. Similarly, the text leaks its meaning at the wake. All the parts, so carefully put together, begin to decompose. And yet – perhaps – this is the thought that strikes the author just as he begins to mourn– perhaps this is what it was built for! It is that thought which turns mourning into style, and a particular kind of style – feverish, hectic, crisis-ridden.

In any case, we will put that image aside and go to the passage, which begins:

“When applied in the sphere of individual freedom, the concept of repetition has a history – in as much as freedom passes through several stages in order to attain itself.” Heiberg, insisting on the dialectical, will get it.

The stages are three.

(a) “Freedom is first qualified as desire – being in desire. What it now fears is repetition, for it seems as though repetition has a magic power to keep freedom captive once it has tricked it into its power.”

This stage echoes Adam’s plight – yes, the Fall is behind it all, with erased Eve in train. When error, or sin, leaps into the world, it takes the form of desire. But of a particular desire – one that does not feel the spiky press of need in its back. Rather, it feels the press of no need at all in its back. In short, it feels the first intimations of boredom. This open up an entirely unexpected hole in the homogenous surface of whatever paradise (Divine or artificial) is at hand. In this sense, boredom and freedom are twins, conceived at the same time.

And need one be reminded of capitalist Europe, with its great Mordspiel of commodities and its new organization of labor into more and more specialized routines? Upon which the circulation laborer sits, endlessly billing.

The second stage, too, seems to point to the Adamic narrative. “b. Freedom qualified as sagacity. Repetition is assumed to exist, but freedom’s task in sagacity is to continually gain a new aspect of repetition. People who in freedom do not stand in any higher relation to the idea usually embellish this viewpoint as the highest wisdom.” Here, repetition takes us back to the experiment, and its strange links with temptation and seduction. Yet Kierkegaard had a strong desire to couple the sage with the buffoon – or to, at least, understand how the pair had so strangely gotten uncoupled. And remember, too, that the buffoon is linked, originally, in Moliere’s play, with Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard did not like the play, but he did understand I think that Don Juan is, by a process of transformations, present in Doctor Faust.

And this is enough for this post. I’ll put the second part up tonight.

…

“But since freedom qualified as sagacity is only finitely qualified, repetition must appear again, namely, repetition of the trickery by which sagacity wants to fool repetition and make it into something else. Sagacity despairs.”

The oppositional point of view, the alien in the artificial paradise, in as much as it accepts the mantle of the sage, has signed its concession already, made itself available for plug-n-play in the institution. When Kierkegaard constructs the series temptation-seduction-experiment, it finishes with the comedy routine, an exploding cigar, a bucket of paint thrown in the public’s face (as Ruskin said of Whistler), or the hectic style of… well, Constantine Constantius. And Edgar Allen Poe’s narrators, and DeQuincey’s Opium Addict. In modernity, the buffoonish decision to make comedy into a routine, to make irony into a repetition, is made in separation from the institutionalization of sagacity. While the dialogue between sage and buffoon which once constituted the two poles of philosophy has dissolved into two separate trajectories, still, each feels the call of the other. Each feels, somehow, the trivialization that attends their split destinies.

Bringing us to the third stage.

(c) “Now freedom breaks forth in its highest form, in which it is qualified in relation to itself. Here everything is reversed, and the very opposite of the first standpoint appears. Now freedom’s supreme interest is precisely to bring about repetition and its only fear is that variation would have the power to disturb its eternal nature. Here emerges the issue: is repetition possible? Freedom itself is now the repetition.”

And here – here, mark ye, our return to the Stoic reference we see later in Deleuze:

‘If it were the case that freedom in the individuality related to the surrounding world could be so immersed, so to speak, in the result that it cannot take itself back again (repeat itself), then everything is lost. Consequently, what freedom fears here is not repetition but variation; what it wants is not variation but repetition. If this will to repeat is stoicism, then it contradicts itself and thereby ends in destroying itself in order to affirm repetition in that way, which is the same as throwing a thing away in order to hide it more securely. When stoicism has stepped aside, only the religious movement remains as the true expression for repetition.”

Through a glass darkly, this is the credo of absolute reaction, thundering against the happiness culture and its awful inability to sacrifice. Underground channels connect our aliens. For surely there is, here, a formal similarity with the moment of revolution, stirring the old corpse that lay buried under bourgeois society, the revolution that made it, that old buried thing – which may not be a corpse at all, but an ardent tunneler, the old mole. Oddly, in the semiosphere of infinite variation, the driving motif is nostalgia for the freedom buried at your feet.

Well, this should end in an anecdote. Levin, Kierkegaard’s ‘secretary”, has given us a record of his last years. Levin evidently found Kierkegaard a trial, but – at the same time – a most moochable man. His memoir sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s The Devils.

“Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day we had soup, frightfully strong, then fish and a piece of melon, accompanied by a glass of fine sherry: then the coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day. Then he opened a cupboard in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort, and said, well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” It was of no consequence, but there was no way around it; I had to choose a set. When I said which one I would take, he asked, “Why?” One always had to explain why, and then at long last we would be finished and get our cups. (He also had an astonishing number of walking sticks).”

Levin, of course, knew where this was all leading to:

“He inherited the house and ninety-eight thousand rixdollars from his father. At his death nearly everything had been spent: he had gradually consumed his fortune.”

So many walking sticks! Such fine coffee! Mes gages! Mes gages!

salle des crises

It was the stoics who first concerned themselves with the logical implication of the event – that is, they were concerned with the seeming disjunction between the realm of the quantitative and the qualitative, which were what they were left with after Aristotle’s syllogisms. The classical example is the heap of sand. There is no one grain of sand that ‘crowns’ the heap, – it does not emerge as a thing to be analyzed quantitatively, its structure opening up, its covering – dermis, hide - transparent, to our pullulating pluses and minuses.

Of course, these are the issues that became famous, again, in the eighties and nineties with chaos and then complexity theory. But the event is the secret rail that many a fumbling soul has squeezed in the dark, going up the back stairs in the Castle. Lichtenberg, somewhere, remarks that the proportion of the corpuscle of light to the eye was similar to the proportion between the Meditteranean and a leaf that has fallen into it – and just as the corpuscle contributes, in its infinite smallness, to the face of the beloved or to any of our visual images, the leaf, for all we know, may create a disturbance in the water that effects the waves coming in on the China coast. Once we have dispensed with the usual metrics of the quantitative, we’ve entered a realm in which what is small and what is large, judged by effect, can’t be predetermined by our biases. We must wipe the impressions on the slate of the mind clean.

Deleuze’s chapter on the problematic begins with the stoic theme of the event – the ideal event. Deleuze, from the beginning, had been influenced by Emile Bréhier’s reconstruction of stoic logic, from which he drew upon to sketch out the nature of the event, one of the great themes in the whole of Deleuze’s work. He is drawn to events like addiction, schizophrenia, revolution – events in which the perspectives given us by addition and subtraction are unsatisfactory, insufficient, and morally degrading.

The event, then, for Deleuze consists of singularities that escape the domain of the quantitative – and yet have a distinct insistence in the world. These he calls ‘singularities”. He quotes Peguy about singularities in history – crises, critical points – and nears, in his language, the kind of talk that the complexity school, in the eighties, adopted as their own:

Péguy saw profoundly that history and the event were inseparable from such and such singular points: “there are critical points of the event as there are critical points of temperature, points of fusion, of congealing, of boiling, of condensation; of coagulation, of crystallization; and there are even, in the event, those states of superfusion that do not precipitate out, which don’t crystallize, which are only determined by the introduction of a fragment of the future event…” And Péguy knew how to invent an entire language, among the most pathological and aesthetic that one could dream of, for telling how a singularity is prolonged in a line of ordinary points, but also takes itself up into another singularity, redistributes itself in another set (the two repetitions, the bad and the good, that which enchains and that which saves).”

I should point out, here, that crisis was not only a term of art in early modern medicine, but – among the Mesmerists – became the supreme event, the moment when the cure of animal magnetism produced its convulsive or deranging effects on the body of the patient. Though I have yet to find any commenter remark upon the connection between Kierkegaard’s use of ‘experiment’, and its connection with seduction and temptation (which I will try to get back to later), there is a certain invisible ink, here. I smell it. I taste it. I am a great licker of pages. Crisis, is, of course, one of the great Kierkegaardian terms.

To return to Deleuze – while other philosophers have clung to the secret rail, Deleuze – and this is the thrill of reading him – seems to switch on a light. One that nobody has bothered to switch on before. In the midst of a sometimes puzzling language, taken from anywhere – having no problem with mismatching vernaculars if that is what it takes – Deleuze explains the seemingly chaotic nature of the event by putting it, ideally, under the reign of another temporal order – Aion. It is in that order that the problematic comes out of its shell, so to speak – no longer is it a subjective difficulty, but it is the horizon of the event itself.

And here I will pause for a yawning parenthesis, to write something about Repetition and freedom for the next post.

the ninth series: the problematic

There is a passage in Nordentoff’s book, Kierkegaard's Psychology, written in the 1940s, that assures readers that when Kierkegaard writes of experimental psychology, he was not speaking of "the rat cages of the laboratory". This is very true; but it is also, from the perspective of a materialist intellectual history, sadly insufficient. That is, the transposition of a contemporary sense of experimental psychology to Kierkegaard’s texts doesn’t really explain Kierkegaard’s relation to the experiments of his own day – the experiments of Baird, the coiner of the word hypnosis – or the experiments Baird references in his chapter on “Nervous Sleep” (beautiful phrase) that were performed by the royal commission in 1783 to evaluate Mesmer, and that were repeated in 1838 to evaluate the cures of animal magnetism. This is too bad – as Jacqueline Corroy has pointed out in an article on the history of experiment in psychology, there was, from the beginning, a large allowance made in psychology for trickery – for deceiving the ‘subjects’. And since Kierkegaard’s own great psychological experiment with regard to Regina Olson involved deception – one would like to know what, exactly, Kierkegaard could have known of psychology.

Yet, in this post I am going to do something that might pick up that same wild anachronistic strain in interpretation – that is, I am going to use a chapter in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense to make some sense of the image of the experiment, and its relation to the world of made experience that characterized the increasingly industrialized capitalism of the West in the 19th century. The artificial paradise, as I call it, boosting Baudelaire’s title.

So how do I justify this? It seems to me that the encounters staged by philosophy occur on a different level than those staged by, say, psychology. This is not to say that they are, ultimately, independent of context, but they are freer within contexts, they have a greater range. Of course, philosophers think they have the freest range, in which they are much like those chickens whose thighs and breasts are wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam for your discerning shopper – they mistake free range for immortality. They never do know what hit them. But then again, does any of us?

The ninth “series”/chapters in the Logic of Sense is called: of the problematic. Oddly, Goethe’s essay about the experiment doesn’t say very much about problems. It is, rather, as if the scientist, falling out of the natural attitude, is solely concerned with the kind of observation that takes him out of himself, into the world of phenomena, where what a thing is, and how it connects to the totality of what is, does not present itself to him as a problem.

However, where the problem is located plays a similar role in Deleuze’s chapter as where repetition is located played in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard made notes for a reply to Heiberg, who reviewed Repetition and condescended to point out a few of the author’s mistakes: most notably, that repetition “belongs to the world of natural phenomena, and it is a mistake to transfer it to the world of spirit.” (286) Kierkegaard was irked; on his reading of Heiberg, this distinction isn’t even honored by the critic. On the other side, the problem, as Deleuze points out, has often been said to be a mental construct: “… a long habit of thought which makes us consider the problematic as a subjective category of our knowledge, an empirical moment which only marks the imperfection of our progress (demarche), the sad necessity we lay under to not know in advance, and which disappears in the knowledge we obtain. However the problem is buried by the solution, it nevertheless subsists in the idea which relates it to its conditions, and which organizes the genesis of the solution themselves. Without that idea the solutions wouldn’t make any sense. The problematic is at the same time an objective category of knowledge and a genre of perfectly objective being. « Problématique » qualifies precisely ideal objectivities. Kant was without doubt the first to make of the problematic not a temporary incertitude, but the proper object of the idea, and thus as well an indispensable horizon for everything that eventuates or appears.”

This notion has been extremely liberating for me – in that it is not the unconscious of history I want to blindly fondle, but the problems, the obscurely felt problematic. This confusion about where in the famous ontological divide the problem, or repetition, should be put is not the only reason, however, that I find Deleuze’s chapter pertinent to Kierkegaard.

Get better, Infinite Thought

One of our favorite bloggers, Infinite Thought, is infinitely sick from various medieval maladies that we didn't think still existed. But who knows about Wiltshire? Thurber, of course, had an aunt who contracted Dutch Elm disease and wilted to death - so you can never tell what is waiting to get you!

Anyway, we are posting five songs for Nina's health:

1. Bored - Deftones. Which must be how she is feeling, between bouts of deathgrip pain.

2. Biggie and Lil Kim. Another. I was going to put a Tatu song here, but ... I couldn't find one that worked. Whereas this dialogue is in its own way... What it is.

3. Kapital - Trubetskoy. A cheer you up Marx-y song, what could be better?

4. London Hates You - the Kills

5. And naturally - Here comes sickness - Mud Honey. Which used to go together with intoxication and cars for me - but not any more! I listen to it very quietly and soberly.

Making experience

The experiment as mediator [Vermittler] of object and subject.


Notice, first, the word Vermittler – in an essay written in 1791, when the philosophical language that has come to characterize modern European philosophy, the language that Hegel employs, has not yet made itself irresistibly felt. It is in the egg. Goethe, who was extraordinary at picking up the faintest traces of an intellectual trend, is not so far away, here – the other shore is glimpsed. But still, in this essay Goethe works in the available Enlightenment thematic and uses a recognizably conversational vocabulary, even though he is turning against the Enlightenment idol, Newton, as well as against the reductionism of Enlightenment science. Remember, the Enlightenment was capacious enough to contain Swedenborg and Mesmer. Remember, remember – there is no capturing what the age sets loose.

The essay begins with Goethe’s notion of the natural attitude of Man towards objects [Sache]. Objects either please him or repulse him – on the affective level – or they are useful or dangerous – on the level of interest.

Goethe sees that this natural attitude won’t do for science – which will always bear the marks of its break from the natural attitude. Science is unnatural.

“Those undertake a far more difficult task whose living drive strives to observe the objects of nature in themselves, and in their relation to one another, for the sake of knowledge: for they soon find themselves lacking the measure [Massstab] that could come to their aid when they observe things in relation to themselves. They lack the measure of being pleased or displeased, of attraction and repulsion, of use and injurt; they have to entirely renounce these things, they must seek and investigate as indifferent [gleichgueltige] and even divine beings what is, and not, what pleases.”

Once we have established that the scientific interest, unlike the natural attitude, must dispense with the usual measures of judging and classifying objects, Goethe notices that we have to find a measure for individuating and combining our objects. “The further we advance these observation, the more we combine objects among themselves, the more we practice this observational talent.”

Goethe approaches a problem here that has recently attracted a lot of attention in the sociology of science – namely, how the scientist is shaped. Instead of assuming that the scientist is simply made by the knowledge he accumulates, his institutional credentials, Goethe – preceding Daston and Galison’s account of the epistemic “virtues” in which the scientist as a social figure becomes distinct from the virtuoso, the savant, the enthusiast – distinguishes the “clever” man, who observes and recounts facts, with the more difficult path of the true scientist:

“Only when the observer, even applying this sharp judgment to the testing of secret natural relationships – when he is in a world in which he is equally alone, watching his own steps, guarding himself before any hurried movement, having his goal continually in his eyes, without letting himself slip into the way of some useful or dangerous circumstance all unobserved; when he thus there, where he cannot easily be controlled by someone else, must be his own strictest observer, and must be suspicious of himself in his most enthusiastic: thus everyone may see that this is the case, how strong these requirements are and how little one can hope to wholly fulfill them, whether one applies this to now to oneself or now to others. Yet these obstacles, one might even say this hypothetical impossibility must not keep us from doing our best, and we will at the very least come furthest when we seek to imagine for ourselves a means in general, by which the most notable men have expanded the sciences: when we exactly examine the deviations on which they got lost, and one when after them, often for centuries, squadrons of scholars have followed them, until later experiences for the first time introduced the observer to the right path.”

Goethe’s language here is later picked up by Nietzsche – whose work in the 1880s associates, in high Goethian style, mistrust with the observer, and especially a mistrust derived from the history of the observer’s capacity for falling into Abwege – byways, deviations. This, of course, always presses on experience. Against the deviation, Goethe of course suggests the Versuch – the manufacture of experience. Observation, here, moves from a moment in which, as the scene of observation enlarges to contain the observer, the object of observation is in danger of being lost, to a moment in which the observer, as it were, constructs an experience that allows him or her to disappear. Seemingly.

The experiment is made out of experience, with the intention of being observed. It is here that Goethe joins together the special sociability of the scientific attitude with the especial anonymity of the experiment. In fact, the experiment is, ideally, not only based on its potential repetition, but depends, for its result, on the cleansing of the bias that may inhere in any one observer’s position. Goethe remarks that in his own work on colors and plants he has noticed that friends or companions have often remarked on this or that aspect of a phenomenon that Goethe himself has overlooked. One of the fictions that necessarily accompany the experiment is that some ideal collectivity will observe all aspects of the phenomenon. That collectivity links science with a sort of erasure of authorship:

If, for us, naturally attentive people are so useful, how much more general must the use be when instructed people work hand in hand! Already a science is in itself such a great matter, that it bears many people, even if it cannot support at the same time support one equivalent man. It has been observed, that knowledge, like an enclosed but living water, by and by lifts to a certain level, that the most beautiful discoveries are not made so much through people as through the times; as discoveries of very important things are often discovered by two or more practiced thinkers. If thus we owe so much in this first case to society and our friends, we will in this case be owing even more to the world and the century, and we can in both cases not recognize enough how necessary are communication, aid, memory and contradiction to keep us on the right path and bring us forward.”

Goethe points the contrast here with art – which, in this essay, is treated as a thing that must originate and make itself in the conscious of the artist alone, until it is ready to be presented to the world – and the world’s knocks. This is a contrast Goethe will later retract. I mention it as a hint of the discord that exists between experiment as an aesthetic and as a scientific term.

But to return to made experience: the experiment cannot be wholly squeezed from the time or its attendant spirits; the made intrudes even on its own unmaking. In the crowd of observers, there are those who would connect experiment to experiment without returning to the bosom of experience itself.

I’ll end this with a long quotation:

“The value of an experiment, be it simple or combined, consists mainly in the fact that, under certain conditions, with a known apparatus and with required skill, it can be brought back into existence every time that the conditioning circumstances allow of being reunited. We rightly admire human understanding, when we also only superficially regard the combinations that have been made for this purpose, and observe the machines that have been invented and, we can truly say, are being invented daily.

But as valuable as every experiment, viewed individually, may be, its value is only maintained as long as it can be united and joined with others. But even to join together and unite two experiments, that have some similarities with each other, requires more strictness and attention as can even be demanded from the strictest observer. Two phenomenon can be related one to the other, but yet not so nearly as we believe. Two experiments can seen to follow one another when between them there must still stand a great series in order to bring them into the right connection. One can’t thus emphasize enough, not to conclude too hastily from experiments: then by the transition from experience to judgment, from knowledge to application, it is as in a pass where all the inner enemies of a person lay in wait. Imagination, impatience, hastiness, self-satisfaction, stiffness, thought forms of pre-conceived opinion, comfort, frivolity, fickleness and however the whole squadron with their followers may be called, all lie here in their secure places and will, unseen, overpower the practical worldly man as even the quiet ones, the observer who seems to be secured against all passions.”

Notes on where the hell I am so far

My intent, with this Kierkegaard thread, is to bring forward certain changes in the way boredom is experienced – or articulated, or signified – in the 18th and 19th century. Boredom, which, as we saw in Kant, provides a strange motive when needs are satisfied – boredom, a nameless suffering that would even afflict Adam and Eve in paradise, in as much as Adam and Eve are constituted as human beings save for the knowledge of good and evil. Surely in the artificial paradise, built on the surplus value squeezed out of the industrial system under the reign of capitalism, premised on viewing the world under the sign of substitution, whether of commodities or humans, all in the service of the abolition of the human limit, must, if Kant is right, produce boredom in ever greater amounts. And thus let loose a motive that plays a lesser role in the society of the limited good.

In Kierkegaard’s Repetition, repetition is not linked explicitly to boredom – but to a certain impossibility to repeat. But taking repetition otherwise, taking it in relation to the routines that link one substitution to another in a great invisible code, we have another sense of repetition and its effects altogether.

In this world of motivations that are other than that of need’s perpetual pursuit of satisfaction, of routines that become tedious to the human product caught in their meshes, experiment, which both affirms repetition as the principle of validity and – in the aesthetic stage, to use Kierkegaard’s terms – offers an image of the never-before, takes on a poetic life which escapes the philosophers of science and the critics who use the word trivially. Experiment has somehow escaped, in its nubs, the historian – although surely here is matter for the Gnostic historian, vowed to Marx and the witch, to batten on.

Goethe's essay on experiment

I’ve been thinking about Goethe’s essay about experiment – Der Versuch als Mittler von Objekt und Subjekt – in relation to my recent, dogged circling about Kierkegaard’s ‘experiments’.

Kierkegaard might have read it – it was published in 1790, and then in Goethe’s scientific works – but then again, he might not. Kierkegaard’s mature work is directed against not only Hegel, but also against Goethe – representatives, both, for the system of modernity, with its elimination of the religious ‘stage’, against which Kierkegaard fought.

And yet, Kierkegaard’s very use of the term experiment shows – as he must have known – that he fought from within the net, the vast net of the Great Transformation, the net beneath the Artificial Paradise. Roger Poole quotes a passage in a memoir of Kierkegaard written by his friend, Hans Brochner, who wrote:

“ I once walked through a whole street with him while he explained how one can make psychological studies by so putting oneself en rapport to passer-by[s]. As he explained his theory, he put it into practice with almost everyone we met. There was no one on whom his glance did not make an obvious impression. On the same occasion he surprised me by the easy way he took up a conversation with all sorts of people. In some few talks he picked up an earlier conversation and carried it forward to a point where he could pick it up again as opportunity served.” [167]

Oh, these city walks!

Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

Further on in his account, Bochner uses the word “experiment” to describe these walks. And here we should recall that the early modern idea of experiment was closely linked to the term, experience. The introduction of observation – of an experience for the sake of experience, like a card game played for the sake of the game – brings us, I think, to the roots of Kierkegaard’s attraction to the word – while at the same time the “experiment” is always ironic, rather than scientific.

In fact, Kierkegaard, in spite of putting Repetition under the sign of the psychological experiment, seems incurious about the category of the scientific.

Goethe, of course, was not. He was, among other things, a scientist, which is why his essay on the experiment is infused with his own experience – and takes up, from the beginning, the deep connection between Versuch (which can also be an Essay) and Erfahrung.

I don’t have time today to do justice to Goethe’s essay. Later.

experiment three

My last post was not meant to show that Kierkegaard was directly influenced by the Mesmerists, or by the use of hypnosis, when he uses the term psychological experiment – although in fact, as he had taken University courses in psychology, he undoubtedly had read something about animal magnetism. But rather I wanted to show links here, chains, connections, intersignes, in which an eighteenth century scene of experiment/seduction is played out on a woman - Puysegur’s patient - who resists him, in the end, allowing him the fetish objects - shoe or bonnet - but nothing more. And I wanted the odd commonality of the fly swatter to stand out - passed from the patient's hand to C.C.'s, chasing after the revolutionary flies of Berlin.

Under the pressure of the observer's gaze, we watch the experiment as a situation under the control of the pseudonym slip out of his hands, and see it appear in Kierkegaard’s hands, where instead of an experiment applied by C.C. to his 'subjects', it is applied to the text itself - the text is an experiment about experiments. And so we have outlined the first problem, the problem of the first page, the problem of the title.

The problem – psychological? Textual? Scientific? then – such is the way of this slippery signifier – seems to slip at this moment, while we are adjusting our glasses, looking at the screen - where we read the text - out of Kierkegaard’s hands too - or out of his control. For what kind of control does our author behind the author have? Why is it that experiment and seduction, experiment and the female, keep finding each other? And not according to the protocols of the manipulated chance in which the experimenter excels, but according to the protocols of nemesis, of fate, of obsession, of luck, it seems. And the experimenter – who is he, and what are his standards? What are his ‘controls”? What is his institutional background?

The institutional background – science, art, religion – is not just a matter of existential stages. Constantine Constantinus, after all, appears so unattached to economic activity, and so, consequently, at leisure to collect cases, a situation that – perhaps – is the reason the young man in Repetition finds him odd – and later on, decides that he is mad. Until, of course, C.C. decides the young man is inexistent. If madness is lack of labor – or if madness is labor that is not socially recognized… And if madness creates situations that are, to the madman’s gaze, experiments, although not so recognized by any others in the social order...

Of course, it is true that this has also happened, in the twentieth century, within institutional psychology. The famous Milgram experiment, for instance, about which one can also ask about its double form – for the participants thought they were in one experiment when they were really in another. They thought they were seeing how much pain a subject could take, when they were really subjects testing how much they would obey an order.

Thus, C.C. is not entirely out of the range of experimenters, eccentric and fictional as he is, eccentric and fictional as they represent themselves. But surely we have seen this psychological experimenter/seducer before, and not as a premonition of our own actuality, but as a figure from the eighteenth century past – for the adventurer develops just such a cold aesthetic objectivity in order to be able to travel between classes and principalities. There is a transformation of types, here, a transubstatantiation – from Don Giovanni to Dupin. C.C. is, in fact, one of those figures that hover around the idea of the detective – that amateur of crime.

How a word will creep into a text. How a word will creep into my ear and down into my heart. All this creeping about.

In the Concept of Anxiety, the psychological observer is described as a sort of actor – or rope dancer. I’ll translate from the German text I have:

“Whoever is concerned in high style with psychology and psychological observation has to take on himself a general human suppleness that puts him in the position to shape his examples right away, and these then have a whole other power of proof, although they don’t possess the appearance of facticity. As the psychological observer must possess a more than rope dancerish nimbleness in order to throw himself imaginatively into people and be able to mimic their attitudes; as his silence in confidential moments must have something seductive and pleasant, so that the disclosed matter can find comfort in this fact, under this artfully brought about inconspicuousness and stillness, and creep out and to unburden itself as in a soliloquy: he must in his soul possess a poetic originality, in order to be able to form all at once, out of that which always presents itself all in pieces and irregularly to the individual, a totality and regularity.”

Two shadows seem to appear to us on the edge of this text. One is Freud – notice how this sketch, which seems to reach out to the psychoanalytic technique of Uebertragen, even denies personhood to the discloser, but instead speaks as though the disclosed were an Es, a thing within the person. The other shadow is given to us by a story that appeared in 1841 on the other side of the Atlantic:

“A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;'—he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;'—he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,'—what, in its last analysis, is it?"
"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."
"It is," said Dupin; "and, upon inquiring, of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."

Carte de la retourne.

experiment 2: the mark of the flyswatter

In the last post we began to touch on the meaning of ‘experiment’ in Repetition. The notion of the experiment as an exercise in cruelty played a major role in Kierkegaard’s battle with the Corsair, when Moller, his opponent, rightly picked up on the cruelty involved in using an ‘experimental’ method on people, or putting a girl in the “experimental rack.” The point of view on cruelty shifts in relation to the terms in which the discourse is expressed – what is cruelty from the ethical point of view is not so from the aesthetic – and from the religious point of view, as Kierkegaard writes in the Edifying Discourse, “… the cruelty consists in the fact that the Christian has to live in this world and express in the environment of this world what it is to be a Christian.”

There is, at this point, a two-fold question: the first is, what kind of ‘experimenter’ is Constantin Constantinus, the pseudonymn-author of Repetition? And the second is, what does it mean to write a text under the sign of the ‘experiment”? How is a text, formally, an experiment at all?

The first question returns us to the romantic view of the experiment. The romantic physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, as Brain notices in his essay on the Experiment as Fragment, actually classified physics and poetry as similar kinds of fields, and wrote an essay entitled Physics as Art. Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic seems, similarly, to extend to the observation and construction of science as well as poetry. What may seem to be temptation, in the religious sphere, is here a kind of trial and error procedure.

In Repetition, C.C. refers to a story by Justinus Kerner. Kerner, as it happens, wrote the official biography of Mesmer – and it was certainly in Mesmer’s circle that the first ‘psychological experiments’ were carried out. As it happened, many of the ‘subjects’ who became most famous for being easy to induce into trances were women. The Marquis de Puységur left a note about a conversation he had with one of his sonambules, a woman named Genieve. I can’t say that Kierkegaard read these memoirs – I can say that there is an intersigne between Repetition – in which, at one point, C.C. describes himself chasing flies with a fly swatter – and Puységur’s note:

One day I questioned a woman in the magnetic state about the extension of the empire I could exercise upon her. I had without even telling her forced here, as a joke, to give me some blows with a fly swatter that she held in her hand. Well, I said, since you are obliged to hit me, who are only doing you good, I bet that I could, if I absolutely wanted to, make you do anything I wanted; for instanstance, I could make you take off your clothes, for instance, etc… No, monsieur, she said to me, it isn’t the same; what I am doing doesn’t seem good, and I resisted doing it a long time, but in the end it is only a joke so I yielded, since you absolutely wanted it; but as to what you just said, you could never force me to take off my last garments – my shoes, my bonnet, as much as you please, but after that you will obtain nothing.”

The relation that C.C. establishes with the young man is, one could say, designed as an experiment in suggestion; with the woman he is in love with, one could say, C.C. views her as a side effect – the strong homoerotic band is with the young man; and finally there is C.C.’s own experiment of a return to Berlin. Yet one view of the book is that it is itself – in its totality, including its authorship – an experiment performed by Kierkegaard.

Of course, there are other psychological experiments in Kierkegaard’s works – which seem, at certain points, to merge with the idea of seduction. For the next post.

a psychological experiment

There are, in the notes for Repetition, a number of variations around the subtitle, which Howard and Edna Hong translate as “A venture in Experimenting Psychology”. Kierkegaard also tried “Experimenting Philosophy” and “Experimental-Philosophy”.

This is a suggestive subtitle for a book about – or at least entitled – repetition, since experiment itself is a form of human activity that, ideally, verifies the theories that it is meant to test by creating a situation that can ideally always be repeated by any competent operator. In the dialectical sense in which Constantine Constantius (who may be the experimentor of the book – or may be the subject of the book’s experiment), in a sense the experiment is already repeated even in its very first instance, since it is intended from the beginning to be repeatable – it is designed along the lines of repetition.

But there is another sense in which just the opposite is the case. In Hans Christian Ørsted and the romantic legacy in science, Robert M. Brain points to Ørsted’s distrust, perhaps via Goethe or Schelling, of the Newtonian kind of experimentum cruces on the grounds that what the experiment shows may well very with the angle of observation: “It is inherent in the infinitude of Nature that no observer can discover all that is implied by an experiment.” Brain argues that the Romantic fascination with the fragment served as an image for the experiment – which, instead of presenting itself as a designed repetition, becomes, instead, an insight into some particular in the infinite stream of nature. Schlegel’s aphorism goes:

“A fragment must be like a little artwork taken totally away from the surrounding world and perfect in itself, like a hedgehog.”

From this point of view, the design of an experiment, and its performance, was as singular as a poem or painting, requiring the high ingenuity of a … well, Dr. Frankenstein or Faust, to name the avatars.

la retourne

As I said before I left for visions of the West, I am going to do a couple of weeks of posts about Kierkegaard – or at least broadly about Kierkegaard. I want to deal especially with Repetition and with The Concept of Anxiety. I want to look at these themes in Kierkegaard from the point of view of the critique of the happiness culture, in which alienation and the claims of the imagination can embody ways out of what is becoming dominant as the Great Transformation destroys the ancien regime and the human limit is dissolved – that is, some other justification for collective life, life in society, other than that justified by happiness.

I want to remember that Repetition is written at the same time that Marx is working out the critical, materialist idea of alienation – a name for certain broad tendencies within the capitalist system. I want to put this under the theme of the path of needles and the path of pins, Michelet’s dialectic of the witch – in which backwards is essentially different from, resistant to, forwards – in accordance with my private rule for Gnostic historians, who pick up on intersignes where others see simple coincidence and who understant that the path is no simple thing – neural paths, paths of breadcrumbs, path of needles, path of pins. The radical dissymmetry between backwards and forwards had made me, at least, a prisoner of the crossroads – that moment in non-identity with itself – where magic and positivism are our players. Or our sides. Or our side effects.

Card of retourne.

We are not surprised, then – that at the very beginning of Repetition, the movements pull apart. Or rather, we hide our surprise between the glacial mask of the master fucker, the Sadean libertine, the holder of the card of retourne:

“Say what you will, this problem is going to play an important role in modern philosophy because repetition is a decisive expression for what “recollection” was for the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowledge is “recollection”, thus will modern philosophy teach that life itself is a repetition. The only modern philosopher who has had the least intimation of this is Leibniz. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards. Repetition, if it si possible, thus makes a person happy, while recollection makes him unhappy, assuming of course that he actually gives himself the time to live and does not, immediately upon the hour of his birth hit upon an excuse, such as that he has forgotten something, to sneak back out of life again.”

Clinamen and a flush

Kant mentions, in his Anthropology, one of the favorite card games of the eighteenth century, pharaon. In Thomas Kavanagh’s essay, Libertine’s Bluff: Cards and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, Kavanagh contrasts pharaon with the century’s other favorite card game, brelan. Pharaon was, it appears, even banned in France for a time in the 18th century, but brelan was not. In his article on brelan in the Encyclopedie, Diderot wrote: "it is most enjoyable, that is, most ruinous when there are three or five players." In fact, the amounts won or lost by brelan were legendary. Kavanagh, however, wants to get past the anecdotal and point to the central social symbolism of card games for the French – and, in general, the ancien regime’s – aristocracy, and he wants to draw a contrast between pharaon, which was a game of chance, and brelan, which was a game of strategies that became part of the pool of metaphors that informed the libertine vocabulary of seduction. Is it right, in fact, to call these metaphors? The connection between brelan and seduction as a game was, on Kavanagh's account, pretty tight.

First, though, I will quote his description of brelan:

“The best three-card hand a player can hold is the "brelan" in the other sense of that word which French retains today: triplets, or three cards of the same value, such as three aces or three kings. If, as was most frequently the case, no player held a brelan, the winner was the player who, at the end of the hand, held the highest aggregate point count in a single suit. In making that count, aces were worth eleven points, all picture cards ten, and the other cards their face value. The most important feature of the game and the guarantee of real risk for all players was the fact that this count was made only after all players remaining in the game after the betting and raising had placed their cards face up on the table. At that point, those holding the highest card in each suit removed from their opponents' hands and added to their own all the lower cards in that same suit. Once this capture by the highest card in each suit was completed, some players held more than their original three cards and some fewer. The one additional feature of the game was that, after the betting and exposing of the three-card hands, one additional card, la retourne, was then turned face up by the dealer. That card could then be claimed either by the player holding three cards, a brelan, of the same value or, if there was no such three of a kind, by the player holding within her original three cards the highest card in that suit.10 In sum, brelan could be described as a simplified form of modern poker, a variant where only triplets and flushes count.”

La retourne. The dealer’s card, the author’s card, the philosopher’s card.

Here, by contrast, is pharaon:

“In pharaon, players have only one decision to make: the amount they will bet. Whether they win or lose has nothing to do with the cards held by the other players at the table or with the bets those others make. In pharaon each player receives a livret of thirteen cards and uses one or more of them to bet on the values from ace to king with suits being irrelevant. Once the bets are made, the banker staking the game begins to turn over one by one the cards from the shuffled deck he holds in his hand. The banker wins all bets made on cards matching the first card he turns and all other odd-numbered turns. The players win when they have bet on cards matching the second card the dealer turns up and all other even-numbered turns.”

Perhaps Kant’s description of the rational man at cards is so stripped of any strategy, and so fixed on the ‘turn’ of the cards, because it excludes the bluff and deception that, as Kavanagh points out, made brelan a school in lucretian strategy. Kavanagh connects the card game to the general philosophical atmosphere of libertinism:

“The libertine and the gambler share a fundamentally Epicurean vision of the world. The same Democritian atomism presides over their convictions as to the con- stant possibilities and unanticipated encounters provided by life in society and by the dealing of a deck of cards. This Epicureanism implied not only a privileging of plea- sure in all its forms, but the conviction that events, what took place and the way things turned out, were guided only by chance. Imagining life as following the model of atoms falling through space until their course is deflected by the random collisions of the Lucretian clinamen, the gambler and the libertine saw the same chance at work in the movement of cards being dealt from a deck and of men and women intersecting within the whirl of social life. Life and desire become a succession of random encoun- ters following one another with no more coherence and no more significance than dealing a jack after a queen from a well shuffled deck of cards.”

Kant and gambling, 2

I’m back from viewing wilderness and… well, from the deep reaches of love. About which you will hear not hear me make a sound, since love has a bower bird’s instinct for building the most elaborate nests to hide its secrets in. …

Instead, I’m going back to where I left off – that is, with boredom’s fit into the system of wants and ‘needs’. A fit that that comes, in Kant, with a scenario that seems to haunt not just the grand seigneurs, but all of art as well. To repeat the last graf of my last post:

“The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.”

Recognize, here, purposiveness without a purpose - wrenched from its place in aesthetics - and taking on another form in the world formed when the chief motivation is not need, but the lack of need – that is, escaping boredom’s mysterious pain. Thus, the gambler plays each hand to win, and plays ultimately to play. Kant was never such an example of cosmopolitanism as in the fact that he never traveled anywhere – like Deleuze’s nomad, he achieved a perfectly stationary position in which everywhere threw itself on the floor before him. Surely, then, he knew of the casinos of Venice and the mad English mania for betting on anything, and knew that many would disagree – many would claim that the whole point was to win a fortune.

But perhaps Kant caught the dry cough in the shuffle of the cards that announces the death instinct at its perpetual repetitions.

points west - fleeing all responsibilities

Bloggin' is going to be irregular - as I'm going on the road to points west tomorrow. To a secret destination - after passing through Marfa. I'd appreciate any suggestions for music, places to visit between Marfa and Santa Fe, etc. Desert music.
On the model of this: Buffalo Skinners.

kant on boredom and gambling

“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.” - Immanuel Kant's sämmtliche Werke: Th. Metaphysic der Sitten, in zwei Theilen, 405, my translation

Boredom in the Metaphysics of Ethics appears as a theme and a term (Langeweile) in the context of ‘play’ – and notably, playing cards.

In a more extended consideration of the sources of playing in the lectures collected in Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie, Kant connects up the notion of Edenic contexts, work, play, and boredom – for it turns out that, in circumstances where our needs are abundantly satisfied, boredom comes into play as the motive pushing us to work or to certain forms of play. It complicates an old equation that posits lack, or need, as the driver of work, or productivity – since boredom is not the same kind of lack as other lacks. What it is, however, is hard to say. “Boredom is the quintessence of unnamable pain.”[Langeweile ist der Inbegriff des unnenbaren Schmerzes.”]

Kant begins with a cultural universal that reaches all the way into the Canadian wilderness:

“The passion for play [zum Spielem – gambling is implied] is met with in every nation, even the Canadian savages like to play, while Chinese are given over to play to the point of mania, so that they bring their wives and children and even themselves into slavery through play. The interests [stakes] in play serve to enliven it and contain therefore such great charms that it constitutes the pastime for most of our society. The cause is that fear and hope continually change places in play…” [257]

The reasonable man, for Kant, then, plays with that alteration of fortunes in mind.

“A rational man, who sets down to play, can not have gain as his intent [Absicht], but he must believe, that he at least in the end must be paid for his stakes. Therefore his intention must be something else other than gain. During the play his intention is, of course, only to win, but he did not undertake participation in the game to do so. Here it is a purely a question of hope and fear, that are fundamentally vain; but one is distracted during these circumstances, and has distracted oneself from the one that one calls boredom. Such an evil, which is what boredom is, one commonly doesn’t know how to name, nor what countervailing means to apply to it. This evil of boredom springs out of the lack of activity.” [258]

The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.

Out of the mouth of the old order

“In 1619, male and female far servants (karler and piger) in Denmark who were dissatisfied with their wages or terms of employment could immediately be put into irons and sent to a public works or to a spin-house. Stavnsband, a compuslsory residence system for males aged between 18 and 36 (intended to secure the supply of soldiers and labour force), was extended in 1742 to cover peasant boys from eight years up, and two decades later the lower age limit fell further to four years.” [Centuries of child labour: European experiences from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, 55]

We forget how often our nineteen century ‘thinkers’ lived in the aftermath of the hot breath of the ancien regime, which had burned their parents and grandparents. This was especially the case with Soren Kierkegaard, who carried within him the anguish of his father, Michael – or rather, Michael as the boy Soren never knew, one of the karler, a shepherd boy who cried out in the harsh night and loneliness of the Jutland plain.

The divide between Western Europe and Eastern Europe in the 18th century was deepened by the fact that in the East, serfdom was strengthened, and continued to be the dominant mode of production for the agricultural sector, while in the West, serfdom was more and more reduced to a series of symbols, which were themselves under attack. Denmark stands out in this picture because – though by position and by its bourgeoisie – it should have been a western nation, its serf system kept getting harsher. Nearly destroyed in 1660 when the Swedes overwhelmingly defeated the Danish armies, Denmark reconstructed itself on the bones of aristocratic power. The king, siding with Copenhagen’s Bürger, took on ‘absolute’ powers and – as was the 18th century pattern – gradually commodified space and labor.

“The events of 1660 led to a radical transformation of the government of Denmark: the administration was modified and in all the general situation of the state found itself ameliorated. From the social point of view, this did not have all the consequences one might have expected. Assuredly the inequality between classes was diminished and the bourgeoisie came closer to the landed nobility. The noble lands ceased to be so much charged with taxes; the fate of the peasants were not modified at all; on the contrary, their situation worsened.” [Histoire générale du IVe siècle à nos jours, Volume 6 by Alfred Rambaud, 618]

Brandes book on Kierkegaard, one of the first major studies, rightly begins by emphasizing the relationship between Michael and Soren, which – like all intense family relationships – sucked in the surrounding history, and carved out a past for the child to carry:


Soren Kiekegaard was the child of old parents; he was born old, he grew up as an old-clever child, who began to brood over himself at such a young age, that it came to him in later life as if he had been neither a child nor a youth, that is, neither without a consciousness nor a care. “My unhappiness,” he said with one of those twisting phrases that he loved, “ was, both from birth and strengthening into my education: not to be an adult man.” He meant by this, that he was a spirit, a very inordinate and comprehensive expression, in order to say something particular about one individual. … in old barbaric times one might perhaps have found this all to unchildish kid to be a changeling, that the fairies had laid in the cradle.”

And so it happens that one shepherd boy in this culture that has long operated as a Moloch to such shepherd boys – one that has long made them the object of suspicion and accusation (literally – contemporary researchers have been surprised, mining the criminal archives of Europe, that bestiality outranks sodomy in those files, and the shepherd boy is often accused) – gets an opportunity. Much like a character in Balzac, he is the beneficiary of the attenuated but still active family network that connects the country to the city, the pious harsh Jutland peasant to the drygoods store in Copehagen. It was wool and the small colonial commodities (the song of sugar, spice, tobacco all over again – our familiar spirits) that made Michael Kierkegaard a relatively well off man.

But – according to his son – at the center of that story of upward mobility is a small boy cursing God on a Jutland Heath.

I want this rural background, since the next threads – mostly about Kierkegaard and boredom – are going to be very urban. We forget that rural sorrows and terrors are carried to the city as much as the city reciprocates with spices and money.

Pareto and the libertarian myth of the just Other

In his General Sociology – I’m using the French version – Pareto writes of two categories of “new” man in the ranks of the governors. The one consists of those who spend nearly as much as they gain, and the other is “constituted by those who take away from their gains not only the amount needed for supporting their great expenditures, but still more, what they have constituted for their patrimony.” And he observes how the modern economy works in Italy: “in Italy, one can observe that almost all the great, recently constituted patrimonies come from government concessions, the construction of railroads, enterprises subvented by the state, tariff protections, and that in this way a number of people have elevated themselves to the ranks of first honor in the state.” (1471)

Although Pareto is the idol of the classical liberal school a la Hayek, his observation rings much truer than Hayek’s fantasy that there existed a golden liberal period in which the great fortunes were constituted by some pure operation of grace in the private sphere, ‘without Government interference.”

Of course, Pareto believed these new men were violating his optimization principle – which is why he could call down upon them the wrath of the economist, rather than the moralist, scorned. But from the political point of view, Pareto starts a unique and little followed critique of democracy by pointing out that democracies don’t, in fact, interrupt the process by which the governing class operates to aggrandize its position. Here, I think, our experience makes us think that Pareto must be right. As – to use the terms of Donzelot – capital lost its place as the distributor of all the world’s evils in the 1970s, and was succeeded by the “state”, an international democratizing movement sprang up, flowered, and, in the 2000s, experienced its decadence: for it was in the 00s that we discovered that bringing democracy to others had to be done, regrettably, by strangling it at home. And thus was completed the second moment of a-politicization of state functions: first, in the 90s, the state suddenly had no business ‘interfering’ in business; and second, in the 2000s, the citizens had no business in ‘interfering’ with the executives right to make and continue war. The disempowerment of the people was accompanied by a politics of scandal that intensified the feeling around meaningless symbols and incidents, crimes with no real scope, the chance remark captured by the open mike, etc.

Pareto’s idea of what might be called the position creep of the governing class is expressed like this:

“We see that, in sum, whatever be the form of the regime, the men who govern have on average a certain tendency to use their power in order to maintain themselves in place, and to abuse it in order to obtain advantages and particular gains, that sometimes they do not distinguish from the gains and advantages of party, and that they almost always confond with the advantages and gains of the nation. It follows from this: 1, that, from this point of view, there will not be a great deal of difference between different forms of regime. The differences reside in the background, that is to say in the sentiments of the population: there where the latter are more or less honest; 2 that the uses and abuses will be all the more abundant as the intromission of the government in private affairs is the greater; in the degree to which the matter to be exploited is augmented, what one can take away is augmented too; in the U.S., where one wants to impose morality for the law, one sees enormous abuses, errors which emerge where this constraint does not exist, or exists in the lesser proportions; 3 that the governing class tries to appropriate the goods of others not only for his own usage, but also for sharing them with the governed class which the governing class defends, and which assures the power to do so, be it by arms or ruse, with the support that the client gives to the patron; 4 that most often, neither the patrons nor the clients are fully aware of their transgressions of the rules of morality existing in their society, and that, even if they perceive it, they easily excuse it, be it that in the end, others do the same, or under the commodious excuse that the ends justify the means.” (1474-1475)

Pareto’s mixture of logic and history here is surely peculiar, as – if we concede that he is correct – it would seem to put into question just what are the ‘goods” of “others”. They would seem, in the end, to result from previous generations of government in which the same logical force applied. And so they are sanctified as private goods after a decent interval has dulled our sense of them as public thefts.

Around this corner, of course, we come to the idea of how those private goods are earned synchronically – and to Marx, with the idea of surplus labor value.

Of course, once one concedes that these 4 moments occur under every regime, throughout the existence of human society, we are less inclined to find the moral argument for not appropriating the goods of ‘others’ to the governed class – that mass of clients. And given that the making of wealth so often is the result of government concession – Pareto’s examples can be multiplied a thousandfold in today’s world of inflated and bogus IP – the virtuous others become such a shrinking part of the total that they are like the legendary hidden dozen just men that keep God from punishing the world – an invisible mass in the world’s visible masses.

Pareto and petit bourgeois nietzschianism

“His belief in man's freedom of thought and action, whether in the marketplace, in the press or in the university lecture halls remained unshaken till the end of his life. His economic liberalism was similar to that of the classical school; he upheld the freedom of markets, defended the merits of a free competitive system and was responsible more than any other economist for turning economics into a positive science, devoid of ethical considerations.”

Such is the summing up of Pareto’s work by one of his modern admirers, Renato Cirillo. The last phrase, with its combination of the petit bourgeois and Nietzschian grandiosity, is meant seriously. But of course it is nonsense: you do not uphold the ‘freedom of the markets”, or think that “freedom” even has a meaning in relation to ‘markets’, unless you are jammed full of ethical considerations, unless they dictate your whole view of the social hierarchy.

Pareto optimization, or “efficiency”, has been enfolded in the neo-classical tradition as something like a law of economics – or at least that branch which deals with ‘welfare”. Now it may seem that efficiency has little to do with needs and satisfactions except as, at best, a measure of the number of steps involved in performing an action. But efficiency has been elevated from humble origins far above the other conceptual gods by the economists, who have found in it a mantra to defend every kind of inequality and turn the tables on the carpers. The classical formulation of the Pareto axiom is this, from Alan Peacock and Charles Rowley: “if any change in the allocation of resources increases the social welfare of at least one person without reducing the social welfare of any other person, then this change should be treats as improving total social welfare.”

It is a dog’s body of a formula, but of course one can see at a glance that – skipping lightly over the exploitation of labor, which we will now pretend never happens and has nothing to do with value – from a neo-classical point of view, this is nearly heaven. To justify the enormous fortunes of the wealthy on the grounds that they somehow earned it runs into the absurdity of ‘earning’ millions for sitting at a desk and making decisions, or for having come up with a nifty device once upon a time in one’s youth, etc. Far better, then, to derail the whole critique by boldly claiming that the rich not only harm no one, but improve the total social welfare every time the dividend check comes in the mail.

Pareto’s own formulation of this maxim is heavily mathematical, which is, of course, another strike in its favor. Mathematizing relations is a very handy way of avoiding the conceptual analysis of same.

Otherwise, of course, this oracular pronouncement seems unlike to help us understand almost any real situation of “allocating” resources.
Let’s go for the first and most obvious problem, which is the presumption that the social welfare is defined in terms of positive gains. As anybody knows, though, this is simply not a general rule for life. In fact, it is often the worst rule to follow. If the allocator of ice cream at the party allocates me a bowl and my friend, Mr. Cardiac Arrest, a bowl, his social welfare would be improved if I stole his bowl of ice cream. Such situations of limits and overindulgence, writ large and small, are all over our “social welfare”.

Which, of course, gets us to questions of the allocator. The allocator is a strange beast, having no self interest of its own, but begin able to read exactly what the self-interest of all individuals in the collective are. Even the neo-classicals back away from this idea – which is why they prepose the much more wooly idea that interest and aggrandizement of goods is the same. Of course, this shreds into little synchronic strobe lit bits the true temporal dimension of the social. That x get wealthy and I don’t may, at time 1, seem to be no skin off my nose – but it is one of the funny things about wealth that you acquire it to acquire power. Wealth is as much a part of a position vis a vis others as it a quantity of purchasing power. This means that there exists a distinct possibility that, at some time in the future, the wealthy man will use his wealth to raise the bar to entry for the non-wealthy man.

How, of course, is our magic allocator to know this? The neo-classical solution, of course, is to pretend that this allocator is dumb to such things, and make a virtue of that dumbness. It is dumb because the future is uncertain! This distributor of cards, this dealer behind the curtain, turns out to be, of course, the market. The, as they like to say, “free market”. And furthermore, we are to believe that this free market is exquisitely sensitive to our needs and wants. Like a tongue tied beau, it woos us with poetry. The market’s poetry happens to be prices.

Even granted that something like “a market” can be extracted from the thousands of real markets in existence in this world – which, I confess, I doubt – the idea that the market is extremely smart and extremely dumb at the same time is curious. In fact, as one of Pareto’s commentators sheepishly admits, Pareto just assumed Say’s law – that markets always clear. Say’s law is the black sheep of neo-classical economics – it dare not speak its name, but – of course – it is believed with the ardor of true love among their ranks.

To be continued

From need to efficiency

In the Idea of History, R.C. Collingwood wrote: “so far as man’s conduct is determined by what may be called his animal nature, his impulses and appetites, it is non-historical; the process of those activities is a natural process. Thus, the historian is not interested in the fact that men eat and sleep and make love and thus satisfy their natural appetites; but he is interested in the social customs which they create by their thought as a framework within which these appetites find satisfaction in ways sanctioned by convention and morality.”

Christopher Berry, in his book, The Idea of Luxury, quotes Collingwood in order to set up a contrast with Marx, who, Berry contends, is generally given credit for ‘historicizing’ needs and satisfactions. For Berry, what needs to be understood, before one makes the contrast work, is the distinction between basic and instrumental needs. The need to eat, for instance, might make a man go forth from his house in search of food, but if the man lives in a small town in Iowa in 2010, he will undoubtedly use his car and go to a grocery store or a restaurant, in the process putting himself in contact with the entire global system of, for instance, the supply of petroleum. The latter may be merely instrumental to the former basic need – but the instrument can be so necessary that the basic need will be unmet if the instrumental need is unsatisfied. Every earthquake shows that what is fundamental and what is secondary can be overthrown and reversed in the wink of an eye.

For Marx’s views on the subject, Berry quotes the classical passages in the German Ideology. Marx, who knew dialectics like a great gambler knows cards, certainly saw the abstract antithesis between need and satisfaction, and the thousand social resolutions that this antithesis set in play. Yet Marx set his face against philosophical histories that shuffled around categories as if there were no circumstances. Collingwood, following the classical bourgeois code, dissolved circumstances into ‘thought” – the thought that creates social customs; whereas Marx traced circumstances into thought, and in so doing opened the ‘basic’ needs to history.

To be open to history, for Marx, meant to be function in some mode of production.
Within neo-classical economic theory, the needs have been submerged in a vocabulary of efficiency – but of course need and satisfaction linger, here, just below the surface. Philip Mirowski has described the marriage of political economics and models derived from nineteenth century physics, which was both an attempt to make economic scientific and a way of translating what Mirowski calls folk psychological concepts, and Marx would call ideological ones, into terms that seem mathematically sound and unquestionable. Efficiency, seen as the correspondents in human society to the notion of “least action” in physics, has served the purpose of displacing the utopian opening that emerges when economics is put in contact with the discourse of needs, even if that utopian opening remains on the level of “unscientific socialism”, since it is evident that the economic system under which we labor, capitalism, has produced a class of owners whose needs are met with such overwhelming means, and a class of laborers whose needs are met with such parsimony and lack, that one wonders how it could possibly be a just system.

Thus, it is a rather shrewd turn to move the conversation to the question of efficiency. Efficiency has a value neutral sound. Moreover, its measurement and definition remain in the hands of a priesthood. So much so that it is sometimes hard to unstick oneself from the ideological determination of efficiency and ask questions about the efficiency of the system as a whole. For how could one ever say that a principle of least action is obeyed in a system in which the satisfaction of the need to eat depends on, among other things, the return on investment for the petroleum company extracting oil from a Nigerian swamp? Instead of promoting a least action principle in shortening the number of action steps between need and satisfaction, Capital tends to do just the opposite, multiplying to an almost miraculous extent the degrees between need and satisfaction.