We have an account of La Bruyère from a contemporary enemy named Vigneul-Marville. V-M took the term “characters” as an apposite plural for La Bruyère’s, who he portrays as having several. The transition from singular to plural, here, is the transition from the morally sound (or the comically obsessed) to the imposter – for it is at this point that the incision of character, its stamp on the body or the psyche, is, as it were, lifted off the counter, and becomes a mask. There is something contagious about the character mask – for instance, even as Vigneul-Marville wrote acidly about La Bruyère’s, he was writing under a pseudonym – his real name was Noël Argonne. In his Melanges, Vigneul-Marville compares La Bruyère to a succession of the great characters of the classical age – to Don Quixote, Socrates, and the Misanthrope. Each is considered from the comic point of view – that is, each is considered an imposture, a usurpation of tone. However, even among these attacks we come upon an anecdote in the Melange that has a certain clarifying Daoist simplicity, one that gives us a clue about La Bruyère and the way that the clerks have always betrayed the Great Tradition of which they are the ornament and reference – for surely La Bruyère must count among the clerks of literature who form a secret Daoist strain in the West. The features of this oppositional, skeptical character form in the absolutist bureaucracies, and of course suffer a great change within the bureaucracies of capitalist circulation, but the knowing listener can hear a distinct note – the kind of pitch struck by Josephine, the Singer of the Mouse Folk – even back in 1680.
This is Vigneul-Marville’s anecdote. At one point in his life, La Bruyère lived in a cramped apartment facing the Ile St. Louis, on the left bank. , as an evidence for, indeed, the manners of the century.
“Nothing is prettier than this character [that of the philosopher], but it must be admitted that without the interposition of an antichamber or cabinet, it was pretty easy to introduce oneself to M. de la Bruyere, before he had an apartment at the Hotel de …. There was only one door to open, and a room close to the sky, separated into two parts by a light curtain. The wind, always a good servant to Philosophers, which ran before of those who entered and returned with the movement of the door, delicately lifted the curtain and let one see the Philosopher, the laughing visage well content to have occasion to distill the elixer of his meditations in the minds and heart of his unexpected guest.”
For Vigneul-Marville, this is the scene of a mock oracle: the lifted curtain, the laughing visage of the philosopher, the gawking admirer. And of course he was writing in the era when, as Fontenelle had explained, the oracles were dead.
But it is a mistake to cut that anecdote out and impose it on the blank counter of our narrative as though it had a face value. For the man behind the curtain was more than the imposter of his enemy’s venom. He was, for instance, a functionary. The son of a Parisian bourgeois, La Bruyère, by education, was destined for the law. Apparently, however, he preferred not to. Instead, inheriting a tidy sum from a deceased bachelor uncle, he purchased into the corrupt system that had developed under Colbert, buying, for 18,000 francs, the sinecure of ‘trésorier de France au bureau des finances de Caen.” This was one of the rotten posts that the Rouen merchant Boisguilbert, in one of the earliest treatises in political economics to distinguish use and exchange value, railed against as a system of robbery. The post was another of the endless rentseeking positions through which money was siphoned from the merchants, peasant and middle landholders to the French court. The treasurer was a sort of money-lender [J. Marchand] who loaned out money at interest to his subordinates, who then sponged the money from the productive class and transferred it up the line, taking out their cut. This was a position that allowed plenty of leisure time to the functionary who had no vocational sense of his function – and La Bruyère had even less sense than most: he made one trip to Caen and then retired to Paris forever, getting his remit in the mail from the Normand bureaucrats who seemed to have objected at first to this obvious malfeasance, and then accepted it to the point that they were surprised, when La Bruyère finally sold the post to somebody else, to have to encounter a real human being who actually moved to Caen in the course of their tax business. (Magne, 1913)
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
the will to powerlessness - a note
A number of forms of knowing crystallize around the notion of character in the early modern era. It is no exaggeration to say that character is at the base of the era’s human ‘sciences’ – Van Delft has called the moraliste discourse ‘the anthropology of the classic age’, and character was at the center of that discourse – but as the human sciences were not institutionalized as such, character traversed what we now separate, as for instance romance and political economy. Thomas Mann, in Magic Mountain, writes with regard to his character, Hans Castorp:
Man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, also that of his epoch and his contemporaries, and even if he may observe the general and impersonal basis of his existence as unconditionally given and self-evident, and be very distant from the idea of criticizing it, as in reality the good Hans Castorp was, yet it is truly possible, that he feels his moral comfort vaguely impaired by its lack.” [My translation, p.58] In fact, Hans Castorp is inheriting the burden of the orator as he was characterized in Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, which was written at some point before 100 A.D. Quintilian experienced in his own life the downfall of the first lineage of emperors – James Murphy, one of his commentators, claims he returned from Spain to Rome just in time to see the bloody transactions that put an end to the Julian emperors and started the new line, from Vespasien. He flattered Domitian, who instituted a cruel secret police state. And yet, he dreamed in his book of oratory of the civic man: “We are to form, then, the perfect orator, who cannot exist unless as a good man, and we require in him, therefore, not only consummate ability in speaking, but every excellence of mind. 10. For I cannot admit that the principles of moral and honorable conduct are, as some have thought, to be left to the philosophers; since the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an orator. 11. Although I acknowledge, therefore, that I shall adopt some precepts which are contained in the writings of the philosophers, yet I shall maintain, with justice and truth, that they belong to my subject and have a peculiar relation to the art of oratory.” [Watson translation] The orator is, indeed, the contemporary – it is as a contemporary that he absorbs the traditions and moves onto the upper management jobs that run the state.
Yet, the contemporary in Quintilian’s day as well as Hans Castorp’s had to practice the critique of society from a rather precarious position. Already, in the Institutes, the critique is ossified. On the one hand, one forms a man whose opinions should count in the way society is run, and, on the other hand, society is being run on a system that will not stop to consult the good man. His will to power is continually undermined by his will to powerlessness – his tactic of never quite confronting the man, of which an extensive record is left in Western literature and philosophy, even beyond Nietzsche “Great Politics”,(perhaps the most ironic expression in modernity of the will to powerlessness).
Monday, June 06, 2011
La Bruyere's field research - a cautionary note
Van Delft is, I think, right to speak of the moraliste tradition as a sort of classical anthropology. I’m going to use this and other suggestions about Van Delft, but I’d like to note that, as is so often the case with historians of literature, one feels a lack of the feeling for the institutional location of such things as “anthropology” or ‘natural philosophy.” We are used to looking at the texts of the past and thinking that here we have an ‘epistemological field,” or a ‘tradition”, without thinking of the fact that it is a modern institutional characteristic to have combined such ‘research programs’ and education in locatable institutions. La Bruyere, acting as the historiographer of Louis XIV, engaged in one sort of research h activity, and as the writer of the Characters, engaged in another. In the latter, there was a sense – one feels it in the introduction to the characters – that the time for making maxims is passing. And yet of course there is no social science methodology readily available – outside of astrology, and the university courses that lead to the creation of the “civic man”.
But we should try to remember certain facts about education in the 17th century. For one thing, it was not an encircling institution – the government, for one thing, did not control it – rather, it was mostly a matter of the church – and for another thing, it was not connected with the vast capillary system that fell into place during the latter part of the 19th century in France and England, and that has always distinguished the United States as an enlightenment state – the states from the beginning took responsibility for education. For instance, in 1792, in Paris, a city with a population of 600,000 people, there were only 163 “regent” doctors, doctors who had gone through a full course of training, in the city. (Coury, 136) When La Bruyere went to school, he went ‘naturally”, as his biographer Etienne Allaire puts it, to a religious school, because ‘there was no other.” And just as naturally, he attached himself to a noble house – first, the Condé. Intellectual historians have a habit of speaking of, say, the rise of a ‘culture of sociability” by quoting people like La Bruyere or Addison or Lessing without pausing to ask how we are to analyse their claims – without even thinking about the kind of ‘field research’ they did. Partly this is because the very notion of ‘field research’ simply didn’t exist. In speaking of his book, La Bruyere gropes towards the authority that resides in the claims of the moraliste, but he never, of course, even considers statistics as applied to populations and the like – it wasn’t just that the sciences were not there, even the concept of populations wasn’t there. The forms weren’t there. Instead, the forms came out of a humanistic schooling that was prescribed for any educated person – doctors were trained in rhetoric as an essential element in their professional makeup. The remnants of this vast, blasted system lie across the landscape of academia today, for – as is my contention throughout – there is not and never will be a total ‘modernisation’ or a society of ‘rational’ institutions.
(I need to develop this more in The Tears of Homo Economicus)
But we should try to remember certain facts about education in the 17th century. For one thing, it was not an encircling institution – the government, for one thing, did not control it – rather, it was mostly a matter of the church – and for another thing, it was not connected with the vast capillary system that fell into place during the latter part of the 19th century in France and England, and that has always distinguished the United States as an enlightenment state – the states from the beginning took responsibility for education. For instance, in 1792, in Paris, a city with a population of 600,000 people, there were only 163 “regent” doctors, doctors who had gone through a full course of training, in the city. (Coury, 136) When La Bruyere went to school, he went ‘naturally”, as his biographer Etienne Allaire puts it, to a religious school, because ‘there was no other.” And just as naturally, he attached himself to a noble house – first, the Condé. Intellectual historians have a habit of speaking of, say, the rise of a ‘culture of sociability” by quoting people like La Bruyere or Addison or Lessing without pausing to ask how we are to analyse their claims – without even thinking about the kind of ‘field research’ they did. Partly this is because the very notion of ‘field research’ simply didn’t exist. In speaking of his book, La Bruyere gropes towards the authority that resides in the claims of the moraliste, but he never, of course, even considers statistics as applied to populations and the like – it wasn’t just that the sciences were not there, even the concept of populations wasn’t there. The forms weren’t there. Instead, the forms came out of a humanistic schooling that was prescribed for any educated person – doctors were trained in rhetoric as an essential element in their professional makeup. The remnants of this vast, blasted system lie across the landscape of academia today, for – as is my contention throughout – there is not and never will be a total ‘modernisation’ or a society of ‘rational’ institutions.
(I need to develop this more in The Tears of Homo Economicus)
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
the roots of ethology revised
Between 1840 and 1900, the character of economic man, or homo economicus, was formulated not so much as a sociological type observed empirically, but rather as a theoretical necessity arrived at deductively. In the model of the market economy as a sort of variant of the electromagnetic field of Maxwell’s, there was need for some molecule upon which market forces could work, and economic man was elected for the task. But, admittedly, this molecule had a backstory, one that was smoothed out no doubt to make him the infinitely rational calculator of myth, and yet still one that imposed a certain historic weight. John Stuart Mill, in the System of Logic (1843), suggested that there should be, at the center of the social sciences, one that was devoted to character itself – ethology. In the twentieth century, ethology was hijacked to describe the study of animal behavior, while the science that Mill suggested died in its cradle. Its object, too, has lead a marginal existence in sociology and economics – far better to speak of the self, the subject, the agent, the actor, than of character. Economists evoke the latter mainly when they turn away from the day’s business and turn to the slightly sickly rhetoric of uplift to raise morale among the newspaper readers and businessmen.
In picking up on character as my thematic to lead me through the transformations wrought by capitalism (or the Great Transformation, or modernization – names that attach to the great sweep that has lead to the artificial paradise we know in the developed economies today, with their great chemical alterations of the environment, their predominantly non-agricultural populations, their electricity, their eight hour a day lifestyle rhythms – a historical epoch that could be said to have been founded by the industrial revolution, or the trans-Atlantic revolutions, or the scientific revolution, and that I think took its start when Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519), I am making use of a category that bears a slightly dented aura. Even in the humanities, where characters still populate novels and films, the study of the unity and peculiarity of character is démodé. My impression is that character has little standing in the social sciences as well. And yet character more than self, subject, agent, personality, actor, traverses much more naturally the three spheres of human existence – the sphere of waking life, the sphere of dreams, and the sphere of third life – of media.
Character was the general study of the moralistes of the 17th and 18th century. When Marx uses the term “character mask” in Capital I, he is pressing on a trope that had a long circulation in moralist literature. La Bruyere wrote, in his Characters: “The difference between a man who puts on an alien character and who he is in the privacy of himself is that of a mask to a face.” [1692, 461] This contrast between an aspect that is not fixed, that can be put on, and that adheres to another, fixed aspect without mimicking it in every detail is a very old trope, suggested by the theater of masks.
A. Körte (1929) traces the word character back to the Greek verb for inscribing and wounding. The verb took on two technical meanings – inscribing in stone or wood, and the second was for the impressing of coins. It was nominalized first to designate the instrument that stamped the coin, and then for the stamp upon the coin. Thus, by a nice etymological coincidence, we find that the transformation of the meaning of character, in the ancient world, already brings us to the subject of money and standardization.
Körte points to the relative paucity of the word in the texts we have up until Aristotle. However, even then the metaphor was working that would link the stamp on the coin to the stamp on the soul. Although, Körte points out, the intermediate link is the stamp of the body:
“The image of the stamp, of the impress, was applied rather early to people, but not to the designation of their spiritual impress, the ineradicable individual type, as we mostly use the word ‘character’ today. It went rather with the bodily appearance, as in Herodutus in the scene of the recognition of the young Cyrus by Astyages: “While the boy thus spoke, there came upon Astyages a sense of recognition of him and the lineaments of his face [karaktes tou prosoepon] seemed to him to resemble his own, and his answer appeared to be somewhat over free for his station, while the time of the laying forth seemed to agree with the age of the boy.”
According to Körte, the final step towards the psychological meaning of character was taken by Aristotle, who liked the idea of using the idea of a wrought appearance – the lineament that is inscribed in a material – to speak of the stamp of habits upon the soul.
James Diggle, in his edition of Theophrastus, claims that the work should be translated as something like Behavioral Types or Distinctive Marks of Character. The metaphor, still working on a flat surface, was a drawing, or the portrait. But the drawing was of a general type – generated from Aristotle’s vices, as well as the vices of other moralists of antiquity. It was immediately seen that these characters had something comic about them, and they were transferred to the comedies of the stage. The comic was, perhaps, a stiffness in the stamp – an obsessiveness which rubs against reality, and which makes the character vulnerable to the stratagems of those he encounters.
At the same time, certain of the moralists took seriously the virtues of character. “The Stoic Posidonius (fr. 176 Edelstein-Kidd ap. Sen. Ep. 95.65–7) proclaims the utility of ethologia, his term for charakterismos: to display a model of virtue is to invite its imitation.” [Diggle, 11] The chain of meanings that lead us from the instrument that scratches on a surface to the surface that invites emulation is a trope that is taken up in Roman culture, especially by the stoics, and again in the early modern era.
At this point, the question of the relation between the mask and character takes a certain turn – and it is one we know well. It is a turn that resembles all the beginnings of a split, a branching off of the natural, a doubling – all the conjectural histories that, taking off from Rousseau in his two great essays on the social contract and inequality, saw the doubling as something suddenly sprung on the human animal… who was of course a Greek. The Greek, back in the days when the world was whole, would don the mask and become the mask, be possessed by it just as the devotee of vaudau would be possessed by a deity. French classicist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, in an essay, A Scandal in Athens: doing the comos without a mask, presents this viewpoint well. Her point of departure is an Demosthenes’s accusation that his the brother in law of his enemy, Eschines, went through the comos, the nocturnal procession or charivari, with dancing, singing and apparently indecent pantomime and the like, in honor of Dionysos. In the essay, Frontisi-Ducroux uses this accusation to understand the use of the mask in classic Athenian culture:
What is the import of this infraction? The question returns us to our interrogation concerning the significance of the mask, in Dionysian rituals, of course, but also generally in the practices and representations of the Greeks. Thus the values which permit us to disengage the term prosopon and its uses does not absolutely go towards the sense of incognito. Recall that the Greek language only possesses a single term to designate mask and visage, and that the two notions, far from opposing one another as in our cultures, are apprehended similarly in terms of faces, since the prosopon is “what is offered to the gaze”. The visage is what each one presents of itself to the eyes of others, and which, in a culture of exteriority, coincides with its authentic being. Thus the prosopon will designate the personage, then the grammatical person, before being applied, in the Christian epoch to the psychological and moral person. In such a context, in order to remain incognito, it is necessary to hide one’s visage, as Ulysses did in Alcinoos’s palace, during the song of Demodocus. But to put on a mask refers to putting on a new personality, which temporarily abolishes the first, which no longer matters. The prosopon that the actor dons is not a mask, in the sense that we understand it, but a new visage which presents its wearer to the eyes of others with other traits, under another aspect and a new identity.”
Frontisi-Ducroux’s difficulty in finding the words to express the person is part of the history she is telling – “personage:, “person”, “personality,” and “identity” are all words devised under the semantic regime of doubleness, of the artificial man. The natural man, of course, does not know his naturalness, and the moment he does know it, that naturalness slips into the retrospective view, never to be inhabited again. This is a variant of the story of the Other, codified in the 18th and 19th century grapple with ’man’ as an object of study and the subject of history. And it is thus – if we accept this story – that the mask and the character, which may seem like a natural couple, are somewhat at odds. To return to our history of metaphors, if the stamp on the coin is to work as the mark of authenticity, it cannot be lifted off – although in actuality coins can be pounded back into blank counters and restamped. But the mask can be lifted off and put on – it is the nature of the mask. It is also in the nature of the convention of masking that the mask represents another face than that borne by the masker. Still, the possibility of the mask hovers over the chain linking the character on the coin to the character stamped on the psyche. And so the mask does couple with the character in one tradition, which leads to the comic character, and eventually the cynical one – the man whose character in public is a strategic mask, an incognito through which he proceeds secretly to his ends. Whereas, in another tradition, the character is that which remains under the mask, that which is the very cast of the moral self.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
an excrement in potentia
I’ve been thinking about the fact that two English philosophers – Shaftesbury and John Stuart Mill – were subjected, when young, to the educational regime of two other English philosophers: John Locke and James Mill.
As far as I can tell, John Stuart Mill paid little attention to Shaftesbury. He certainly didn’t know of Shaftesbury’s strange notebooks, the Philosophical Regimen, as they were called by their first editor, Benjamin Rand, although Shaftesbury called them the Askemata, or Exercises. I'v e previously written about this, and thought I'd reproduce the following:
Ginzburg did not include Shaftesbury in his brilliant essay on the geneology of Estrangement as a literary device, in which he traces, link by link, the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. However, Ginzburg’s explanation of the Stoic method – a method that is neither dialectical nor introspective nor, quite, logical - can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:
“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:
“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”
Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”
Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....
“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)
While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:
“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”
Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.
Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.
The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia
“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”
The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:
“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)
And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.
Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)
The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred.
As far as I can tell, John Stuart Mill paid little attention to Shaftesbury. He certainly didn’t know of Shaftesbury’s strange notebooks, the Philosophical Regimen, as they were called by their first editor, Benjamin Rand, although Shaftesbury called them the Askemata, or Exercises. I'v e previously written about this, and thought I'd reproduce the following:
Ginzburg did not include Shaftesbury in his brilliant essay on the geneology of Estrangement as a literary device, in which he traces, link by link, the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. However, Ginzburg’s explanation of the Stoic method – a method that is neither dialectical nor introspective nor, quite, logical - can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:
“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:
“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”
Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”
Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....
“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)
While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:
“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”
Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.
Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.
The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia
“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”
The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:
“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)
And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.
Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)
The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Doormen of genius
The great wheel of circulation is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it. The revenue of the society consists altogether in those goods, and not in the wheel which circulates them. – Adam Smith
How can we reconcile what Simmel says about the lengthening of the means – the lengthening of the instrumental interval – to ends in capitalism with our experience of what Marx pointed out again and again – that capitalism becomes a global second nature that conceals the system of production under the great wheel of circulation? For, starting from Marx’s perception, we notice that everything seems speeded up, and not slowed down, in capitalism. For Shylock and Bassanio, a bet on cargo would take months to come to some end – but for a Jerome Kerviel, hundreds of millions of dollars can be bet and lost or won on bundles of financial instruments in the course of a day merely by using a cursor. The sugar I put in my coffee today came Saint Louis, a company that refines and distributes sugar derived from beets cultivated in Europe, while the coffee came from Peru. Both were purchased at the Monoprix down the street. The logistical network by which both products could be refined, packaged, trucked to stores and finally end up consumed on my table is only intermittently visible to anyone – it is visible in the truck that unloads the packages and the store clerks who stock it – it is visible to the rural proles who harvest the beans, picturesquely dressed in colorful and characteristic clothing and smiling (according to the image on the package) (although in reality probably wearing tee shirts that say Harvard or Hard Rock Café or something similar and blue jeans, part of the vast dump of tee shirts throughout the undeveloped economies), and visible as digits displayed on a screen to accountants at the company and stock market traders. All of which means that as Simmel’s teleological series are lengthening, they are also producing the appearance of temporal shortening – they are faster. The faster they are, the more they are lengthened – this is one of the paradoxes of capitalism.
It is a paradox that, as well, impinges on the novelistic representation of the Great Transformation. Lukacs, in the Theory of the Novel, speaks a little mysteriously of the various regimes of “distance” between the hero and the meaning of life in the epic, the tragedy, and the novel. This distance is, I think, an expression of the teleological chains that Simmel saw on the surface of life in a fully monetized society. For the epic and the tragic hero, the quest is to understand the sense of life in the face of fate – the world here consists of large, or one might say, royal contingencies. But for the novelistic hero, fate doesn’t have the same totalizing meaning – it has, instead, a dispersing meaning.
“For life, gravity means: the absense of any present sense, the indissoluble enclosure in senseless causal connections, the withering in fruitless nearness to earth and farness from heaven, the having to endure in not being able to liberate oneself from the irons of simple brutal materiality from that which for the best immanent forces of life is the continual goal of overcoming: expressed with the value concept of form – triviality.”
Baudelaire said that Balzac’s novels are distinguished from the usual novel of moeurs by the fact that Balzac’s delight in the massive triviality of material circumstances transforms them into signs and symbols of genius: “All his personages are endowed with a vital ardor by which he is himself animated. All his fictions are as profoundly colored as dreams. From the summit of the aristocracy to the plebes at the bottom, all the actors of his Comedy are more eager for life, more active and clever in struggle, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In brief, each, with Balzac, even the doormen, have genius.”
Baudelaire is a very surefooted critic. Wilde obviously copies Baudelaire here in his famous essay on the Decay of Lying, and Wilde was as cunning as a jewel thief when it came to copping the shiny bits of his predecessors. But though I am sure that Baudelaire is correct about the excess in Balzac, I am not sure that this excess did not flow back into life – or rather, I am not sure that Balzac was not simply being prophetic. Proust thought so – thought that the aristocracy absorbed Balzac’s aristocrats into the norms of their own behavior. The transmission, here, was obviously through a literacy and taste that one might not suppose in the doormen. But could it be… could it be that the burden of trivia itself imposed a struggle upon them such that the result, under the Great Transformation, in the midst of teleological chains that were both lengthening and shortening – in an Alice in Wonderland world – was that genius became a job requirement of the doormen of Paris, London or New York? In comparison to the Sganarelles and Figaros of the old order, at least.
How can we reconcile what Simmel says about the lengthening of the means – the lengthening of the instrumental interval – to ends in capitalism with our experience of what Marx pointed out again and again – that capitalism becomes a global second nature that conceals the system of production under the great wheel of circulation? For, starting from Marx’s perception, we notice that everything seems speeded up, and not slowed down, in capitalism. For Shylock and Bassanio, a bet on cargo would take months to come to some end – but for a Jerome Kerviel, hundreds of millions of dollars can be bet and lost or won on bundles of financial instruments in the course of a day merely by using a cursor. The sugar I put in my coffee today came Saint Louis, a company that refines and distributes sugar derived from beets cultivated in Europe, while the coffee came from Peru. Both were purchased at the Monoprix down the street. The logistical network by which both products could be refined, packaged, trucked to stores and finally end up consumed on my table is only intermittently visible to anyone – it is visible in the truck that unloads the packages and the store clerks who stock it – it is visible to the rural proles who harvest the beans, picturesquely dressed in colorful and characteristic clothing and smiling (according to the image on the package) (although in reality probably wearing tee shirts that say Harvard or Hard Rock Café or something similar and blue jeans, part of the vast dump of tee shirts throughout the undeveloped economies), and visible as digits displayed on a screen to accountants at the company and stock market traders. All of which means that as Simmel’s teleological series are lengthening, they are also producing the appearance of temporal shortening – they are faster. The faster they are, the more they are lengthened – this is one of the paradoxes of capitalism.
It is a paradox that, as well, impinges on the novelistic representation of the Great Transformation. Lukacs, in the Theory of the Novel, speaks a little mysteriously of the various regimes of “distance” between the hero and the meaning of life in the epic, the tragedy, and the novel. This distance is, I think, an expression of the teleological chains that Simmel saw on the surface of life in a fully monetized society. For the epic and the tragic hero, the quest is to understand the sense of life in the face of fate – the world here consists of large, or one might say, royal contingencies. But for the novelistic hero, fate doesn’t have the same totalizing meaning – it has, instead, a dispersing meaning.
“For life, gravity means: the absense of any present sense, the indissoluble enclosure in senseless causal connections, the withering in fruitless nearness to earth and farness from heaven, the having to endure in not being able to liberate oneself from the irons of simple brutal materiality from that which for the best immanent forces of life is the continual goal of overcoming: expressed with the value concept of form – triviality.”
Baudelaire said that Balzac’s novels are distinguished from the usual novel of moeurs by the fact that Balzac’s delight in the massive triviality of material circumstances transforms them into signs and symbols of genius: “All his personages are endowed with a vital ardor by which he is himself animated. All his fictions are as profoundly colored as dreams. From the summit of the aristocracy to the plebes at the bottom, all the actors of his Comedy are more eager for life, more active and clever in struggle, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In brief, each, with Balzac, even the doormen, have genius.”
Baudelaire is a very surefooted critic. Wilde obviously copies Baudelaire here in his famous essay on the Decay of Lying, and Wilde was as cunning as a jewel thief when it came to copping the shiny bits of his predecessors. But though I am sure that Baudelaire is correct about the excess in Balzac, I am not sure that this excess did not flow back into life – or rather, I am not sure that Balzac was not simply being prophetic. Proust thought so – thought that the aristocracy absorbed Balzac’s aristocrats into the norms of their own behavior. The transmission, here, was obviously through a literacy and taste that one might not suppose in the doormen. But could it be… could it be that the burden of trivia itself imposed a struggle upon them such that the result, under the Great Transformation, in the midst of teleological chains that were both lengthening and shortening – in an Alice in Wonderland world – was that genius became a job requirement of the doormen of Paris, London or New York? In comparison to the Sganarelles and Figaros of the old order, at least.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
revelatory preferances
As economists with a psychological bent have discovered, there is a problem with the way economists talk about preferences. Preferences in the neo-classic paradigm, codified by Arrow and Debreu, are invariant and logically sorted by a simple transitivity rule, so that if preference a is preferred to b and b to c, a is preferred to c. There is no test ‘in the wild’ that has ever reproduced this theorem.
However, economists generally dismiss tests in the wild as non-relevant, for, they claim, either the psychological tests that show non-transitivity are due to the special circumstances of the experiment itself, or empirical non-transitivity itself doesn’t count, because models that are transitive approximate the collective reality of markets.
There is, however, another problem with the idea of ‘choice’ as it is used in mainstream economics. It divorces consumption from what Simmel considered one of the hallmarks of modernity: the increase in both the number of links and the complexity of links that leads from means to ends. Simmel considers that money triumphs as an institution in modern society because it forms a perfect means in the midst of the tangle of means and purposes.
For the economist, revealed preferences have a certain dead-endedness – whether one buys a commodity for another end, or for itself alone makes no difference to the economic analysis of the transaction. But it is easy to see that this can’t be true. It isn’t simply that there is a difference between a company buying coal to make steel with – which, though a consumption of coal, leads to another purpose that will have a global effect on the purchase of the coal – but it is also true that satisfaction, or marginal utility, is also effected by the means-end chain.
As Simmel points out, for the individual, there is a divide between the logic of purposes, in which an overall purpose gives meaning and direction to a chain of means, and the emotional and motivational logic of means, in which means as stages in which one must act in a certain way have to be endured or enacted with a purposiveness in their own right that absorbs energy. Indeed, it is a common experience for those who finish a long task, say, writing a book or even simply an article, to feel a letdown at the end of the process, as one is simultaneously freed from exerting one’s energy and attention to the matter at hand and at the same time left with a sort of unguided and unstructured moment. The moment is not a vacation – it is a crowning, a finish, an ending. And yet it doesn’t give one anything to do.
But of course there is more to Simmel’s point than this. Much of the modern life-story is taken up with long-term projects of consumption towards some end. College students, for example, are encouraged from the very beginning to aim at some degree, which is in turn seen as the key to a job. And yet, as the degree is years off, it would be difficult to make a calculation to understand just how much time and energy one should spend on each step. Not that something like this doesn’t happen – a computer science student in an elective English literature class is very often a study in someone who has calculated exactly how little time needs to be spent on a subject that is only a lightly weighted means to his end. Of course, this student intersects with a teacher whose purpose is, in fact, exactly to teach that English literature class. Modern life is full of what we might call purposive jams – like traffic jams, they consist of people who, jostling one another, are going different places but find themselves within the limits of the same narrow situation.
The series of means is also susceptible to another contingency: polysemy. For as the steps, the means, to these longer ends are situations, they also have a multitude of affordances. The student might, by some miracle, fall in love with English literature, which would change his purposes entirely. This is a reality that doesn’t fall under revealed preferences, but quite the reverse – the preference itself is revelatory.
The adventure of modern life begins with revelatory preferences.
However, economists generally dismiss tests in the wild as non-relevant, for, they claim, either the psychological tests that show non-transitivity are due to the special circumstances of the experiment itself, or empirical non-transitivity itself doesn’t count, because models that are transitive approximate the collective reality of markets.
There is, however, another problem with the idea of ‘choice’ as it is used in mainstream economics. It divorces consumption from what Simmel considered one of the hallmarks of modernity: the increase in both the number of links and the complexity of links that leads from means to ends. Simmel considers that money triumphs as an institution in modern society because it forms a perfect means in the midst of the tangle of means and purposes.
For the economist, revealed preferences have a certain dead-endedness – whether one buys a commodity for another end, or for itself alone makes no difference to the economic analysis of the transaction. But it is easy to see that this can’t be true. It isn’t simply that there is a difference between a company buying coal to make steel with – which, though a consumption of coal, leads to another purpose that will have a global effect on the purchase of the coal – but it is also true that satisfaction, or marginal utility, is also effected by the means-end chain.
As Simmel points out, for the individual, there is a divide between the logic of purposes, in which an overall purpose gives meaning and direction to a chain of means, and the emotional and motivational logic of means, in which means as stages in which one must act in a certain way have to be endured or enacted with a purposiveness in their own right that absorbs energy. Indeed, it is a common experience for those who finish a long task, say, writing a book or even simply an article, to feel a letdown at the end of the process, as one is simultaneously freed from exerting one’s energy and attention to the matter at hand and at the same time left with a sort of unguided and unstructured moment. The moment is not a vacation – it is a crowning, a finish, an ending. And yet it doesn’t give one anything to do.
But of course there is more to Simmel’s point than this. Much of the modern life-story is taken up with long-term projects of consumption towards some end. College students, for example, are encouraged from the very beginning to aim at some degree, which is in turn seen as the key to a job. And yet, as the degree is years off, it would be difficult to make a calculation to understand just how much time and energy one should spend on each step. Not that something like this doesn’t happen – a computer science student in an elective English literature class is very often a study in someone who has calculated exactly how little time needs to be spent on a subject that is only a lightly weighted means to his end. Of course, this student intersects with a teacher whose purpose is, in fact, exactly to teach that English literature class. Modern life is full of what we might call purposive jams – like traffic jams, they consist of people who, jostling one another, are going different places but find themselves within the limits of the same narrow situation.
The series of means is also susceptible to another contingency: polysemy. For as the steps, the means, to these longer ends are situations, they also have a multitude of affordances. The student might, by some miracle, fall in love with English literature, which would change his purposes entirely. This is a reality that doesn’t fall under revealed preferences, but quite the reverse – the preference itself is revelatory.
The adventure of modern life begins with revelatory preferences.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Freedom and money
And everywhere we go people be like damn where you from, where you from
I'm from moneyland
So give me some money, man
In the last post in this series, I wrote about Caillois’s sense of the morphology of the game. Whether it is the triangle of baseball, the rectangle of the football field, or the strew of different bits of plastic models under the Christmas tree, play ultimately forms a circle about itself, much like God – that archetype of the circle in which the center is nowhere and everywhere.
As I also pointed out, one of the grounds of play, in Caillois’ schema – the freedom of choosing to play – seems to have a deep connection to one of the grounds of modern capitalism in Marx’s view – free labor. The player’s choice to obey certain rules – whether scripted or spontaneous – and the laborer’s choice to sell a certain product for money – one’s ‘time – both give us moments of relative freedom, the bounds of which are determined in the system in operation.
Georg Simmel was also attracted to social ‘morphology’ – to hubs and linkages, to circles and the social meaning of encirclement. One catches a glimpse of the idea of the ‘encircling’ institution in the Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel presses on the parallelism of three social factors in modernity: law, money, and education, the latter of which bears the guises of science, culture, and ‘intelligence’. The parallelism begins with the ‘leveling’ logic to which they are all subject. Thagt is, they operate on the principal of equalization. The law ideally views all those subject to it as equal; all commodities are equally buyable by money, even if by different amounts; and the content of intelligence is defined as such by being equally true for all who gain access to it. In modernity, then, the legitimation of hierarchy is derived from quantity rather than quality, to put it in vulgar Hegelian terms.
But this quantitative aspect is deceptive – behind the piles of money or the IQ test, there lurk social mechanisms that are certainly qualitative, disciplinary, and positional in more than quantitative terms. I have been pondering this equality in terms of the idea of the encircling institution. In the premodern landscape, the police, schools, and money were, of course, present, but they were not omnipresent. They did not have an enclosing nature. All three, however, developed in tandem with each other within the modern state, especially after the French Revolution. By this I mean that they ‘touched’ everyone. Where before – as one can see by reading, for instance, Mazzoni’s The Betrothed – great patches of Italy had literally no law enforcement at all, which was as true for England, Scotland, Massachussetts and Russia, etc. In addition, these kingdoms, city states and colonies were mainly rural, with economies that could be and was run with little reference to money as such. And, finally, there was no school system set up did not service the population as a whole of the European states (except for Holland) until the early nineteenth century. Then, in the U.S., in Prussia, and later than that in France and England, literacy, the greatest of all impositions on the Little Tradition by the Great Tradition, became theoretically mandatory. And even then, it is surprising, when one looks at the statistics, how few people were processed through higher education. A scientist in France in 1888 could well have met all the specialists in his field, or at least all those with diplomas: there was relatively few.
What is important to remember is that all three encircling institutions were put in place on a national scale by the end of the nineteenth century. One of the morphological mistakes of orthodox Marxism is to consider this a matter not of circles, but of a vertical constructs – hence, the famed structure/superstructure idea. Marx himself used this image not as a permanent heuristic but as a heuristic at hand to get to the notion of class. It is, however, certainly not indispensable, and a firmer sense of the circulation of commodities erodes that image.
I began this post with a reference to freedom. Heine, as I pointed out weeks and weeks ago, usefully analyzes freedom in terms of privacy, equality, and utopia (and here I am simplifying his simplification). Simmel takes a materialist approach to freedom that helps us understand the coupling of freedom and encirclement. Like everything Simmel writes in The Philosophy of Money, the insight tends to get buried in a very confusing style of topical presentation – a style that yearns to be aphoristic and that takes on its systematic duties as almost a punishment, which is then meted out to the reader. Myself, I understand how one can beat one’s wings against the cage of the dullest prose: but in life there is rhapsody, and there is taking out the garbage, and one should try, when possible, not to confuse the two.
In my next post, I think, or the next at least in this series, we will discuss freedom and money
I'm from moneyland
So give me some money, man
In the last post in this series, I wrote about Caillois’s sense of the morphology of the game. Whether it is the triangle of baseball, the rectangle of the football field, or the strew of different bits of plastic models under the Christmas tree, play ultimately forms a circle about itself, much like God – that archetype of the circle in which the center is nowhere and everywhere.
As I also pointed out, one of the grounds of play, in Caillois’ schema – the freedom of choosing to play – seems to have a deep connection to one of the grounds of modern capitalism in Marx’s view – free labor. The player’s choice to obey certain rules – whether scripted or spontaneous – and the laborer’s choice to sell a certain product for money – one’s ‘time – both give us moments of relative freedom, the bounds of which are determined in the system in operation.
Georg Simmel was also attracted to social ‘morphology’ – to hubs and linkages, to circles and the social meaning of encirclement. One catches a glimpse of the idea of the ‘encircling’ institution in the Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel presses on the parallelism of three social factors in modernity: law, money, and education, the latter of which bears the guises of science, culture, and ‘intelligence’. The parallelism begins with the ‘leveling’ logic to which they are all subject. Thagt is, they operate on the principal of equalization. The law ideally views all those subject to it as equal; all commodities are equally buyable by money, even if by different amounts; and the content of intelligence is defined as such by being equally true for all who gain access to it. In modernity, then, the legitimation of hierarchy is derived from quantity rather than quality, to put it in vulgar Hegelian terms.
But this quantitative aspect is deceptive – behind the piles of money or the IQ test, there lurk social mechanisms that are certainly qualitative, disciplinary, and positional in more than quantitative terms. I have been pondering this equality in terms of the idea of the encircling institution. In the premodern landscape, the police, schools, and money were, of course, present, but they were not omnipresent. They did not have an enclosing nature. All three, however, developed in tandem with each other within the modern state, especially after the French Revolution. By this I mean that they ‘touched’ everyone. Where before – as one can see by reading, for instance, Mazzoni’s The Betrothed – great patches of Italy had literally no law enforcement at all, which was as true for England, Scotland, Massachussetts and Russia, etc. In addition, these kingdoms, city states and colonies were mainly rural, with economies that could be and was run with little reference to money as such. And, finally, there was no school system set up did not service the population as a whole of the European states (except for Holland) until the early nineteenth century. Then, in the U.S., in Prussia, and later than that in France and England, literacy, the greatest of all impositions on the Little Tradition by the Great Tradition, became theoretically mandatory. And even then, it is surprising, when one looks at the statistics, how few people were processed through higher education. A scientist in France in 1888 could well have met all the specialists in his field, or at least all those with diplomas: there was relatively few.
What is important to remember is that all three encircling institutions were put in place on a national scale by the end of the nineteenth century. One of the morphological mistakes of orthodox Marxism is to consider this a matter not of circles, but of a vertical constructs – hence, the famed structure/superstructure idea. Marx himself used this image not as a permanent heuristic but as a heuristic at hand to get to the notion of class. It is, however, certainly not indispensable, and a firmer sense of the circulation of commodities erodes that image.
I began this post with a reference to freedom. Heine, as I pointed out weeks and weeks ago, usefully analyzes freedom in terms of privacy, equality, and utopia (and here I am simplifying his simplification). Simmel takes a materialist approach to freedom that helps us understand the coupling of freedom and encirclement. Like everything Simmel writes in The Philosophy of Money, the insight tends to get buried in a very confusing style of topical presentation – a style that yearns to be aphoristic and that takes on its systematic duties as almost a punishment, which is then meted out to the reader. Myself, I understand how one can beat one’s wings against the cage of the dullest prose: but in life there is rhapsody, and there is taking out the garbage, and one should try, when possible, not to confuse the two.
In my next post, I think, or the next at least in this series, we will discuss freedom and money
Monday, May 16, 2011
Some rambling notes on entanglement
In 1991, an anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, wrote a book entitled “Entangled Objects” in which he proposed that other dimensions of commodity exchange exist outside of what is usually analyzed in terms of production and circulation. That is, objects are entangled with other objects and situations to a degree that confounded both the theory of revealed preference and the Marxist analysis of surplus value, the latter of which held production and circulation too far apart, the former of which had forgotten production and overlapping markets altogether. The idea of entanglement was taken up by two different economic sociologists, Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who have clashed about just what it means. Callon, who is better known, is one of the architects of Actor Network Theory, has made field studies of fishermen and stock brokers to study markets and producers. His theory of markets, based in this research, accords a great role to what he calls the performativity of economics models – that is, economists model transactions according to theories of rational choice and then real markets are molded to adhere to the model. It is a sort of para-Dorian Gray effect, with the wickedness of the economist showing up in the way market participates in a particular market identify themselves. Miller has developed what he calls a virtual theory of markets – by which he means that transactions that are framed as exchanges in a market are so framed by the abstractions of economics, which paints a virtual picture of economic reality and works to make the latter conform to the former.
Miller, unlike Callon, does not give the market framing any ontological privilege. Thus, he resists the whole idea that the market describes anything more than a locale in which commodities are exchanged.
For both thinkers, the way objects are entangled in production and the symbolic realm make the neo-classical claim about the exchange of commodities unrealistic. Both writers are engaged in what Mill called ethology; unlike Mill, however, both Miller and Callon think that there is an experimental dimension to economic theory, which is enacted or performed in real transfers of objects.
The polemic between Miller and Callon has crystallized around an example, introduced by Miller - a transaction that does not, as it happens, involve the cowry shells beloved by economic anthrologists: the buying of a Renault automobile.
That it is a Renault instead of a Honda or a Ford is a sign that this is, among other things, a transatlantic debate. The French car gives us a vaguely French buyer – in Miller’s example, a woman named Sophie, who accrues a profile that would make her ideal for an Oprah interview:
“So let us imagine the case of Sophie buying a Renault. What are the factors that determine Sophie’s selection of this car and the price she is prepared to pay for it?
Sophie is recently divorced and, while she has kept possession of the family house, her ex-husband kept the car. Her income is now much restricted so the Renault will be a small one. This is an important decision for her, one of the most signicant purchases she has made for a while. For one thing she is suddenly redefining her image as an individual as against being a ‘partner’ in a
relationship. So the aesthetics and the image of the car are important as a decision about her outward appearance, and many of her friends are very stylish. She is quite proud of that element of nationalism that leads her towards buying a French car, with a confidence bolstered by recent victories in football. So she is clear that she wants a Renault as opposed to say a Fiat or Toyota. Also the car
is becoming ever more important to her since her two children are growing to an age where much of her parenting consists of chauffeuring them around to friends and activities, so the car must function well to facilitate her daily responsibilities (Maxwell 2001). Also she has realized that car journeys are
actually the main time when she listens to loud music so the sound system in the car is perhaps more important than the hi-fi. in her home (Bull 2001). Sophie is also (to an admittedly rather mild degree) a bit of an environmentalist so that some of the ‘costs’ of the car, which are normally regarded as externalities, are internal to her equation. She wants an efficient engine principally to save her
own petrol costs but also she is happy that this is for the sake of the earth as well as for the sake of her budget.” [“Turning Callon Right side up” ]
I will overlook the oddly sappy terms in which Sophie’s character is described, although they have the glaze of self-help psychology – Sophie is, as E.M. Forster might put it, a thin character, and she is all the thinner for being “confident”, or ‘happy for the sake of the earth’, that her car has good gas mileage,etc. Oddly, Miller, who has done ethnographic fieldwork, seems uninterested in saying exactly what the ‘earth’ means to Sophie. However, aside from Sophie’s cartoonishness, Miller’s portrait is distinguished by a lack of noticing both the material situation in which his purchaser makes her purchase – where does Sophie live, anyway? – and a blind spot so large as to be puzzling: Sophie is not ‘purchasing’ a car, if she is a normal car buyer – she is taking out a loan.
That new cars are big ticket items for most drivers, and that they are entangled, at both ends of the market transaction (that is, the ends designated by the seller and the buyer) is, one would think, one of the primary entanglements of this transaction. It is one of the reasons that the disentanglement is so doubted by Miller and so easily imagined by Callon:
"As noted elsewhere, the object of the transaction may be a service, irrespective of how ‘immaterial’ it may seem. For example in Sophie’s case the sale may include a leasing contract or after-sales services. But since all that is specified and qualified, salespersons and buyers are quits once the transaction has been completed. In other words... the disentanglement of the car from the seller’s complicated and
heterogeneous world is accomplished. And this is because the goods are detached and
reattached that the two agencies become quits: the two processes are strongly intertwined. In other words it is quite impossible to separate the two issues of the embeddedness and of the alienation of (commercial) goods.”
Callon’s borrowing of the term agencement from Deleuze is one way to grasp the fact that choice or consumption is only one dimension of the economy – production is the other. Marx and the classical economists knew this well; the neo-classicals have erected an entire science on forgetting it. Yet Callon, too, envisions a checkbook and the alienation of property, as though Sophie were buying a steak. The checkbook brings into this transaction a bank; it should also bring into this transaction the seller’s terms, which will certainly include an interest rate. Callon mentions the lender's terms, but doesn't seem to understand that alienation here is a highly conditioned term. Sophie operates, as we all do, in a world in which purchase is not a matter of being endowed with a supply of funds equal to one’s desire for goods, but rather in a world in which one’s continuing supply of income makes one suitable for funds flowing from other parties – banks, credit card companies, the automaker’s own lending unit – which in turn leads to secondary transactions – the bundling of loans into larger financial products that can be sold amongst parties in such derivative markets – and so on. At the time Callon published his refutation of Miller, in 2005, there was something like 300 trillion dollars of derivates contracts being traded “out there” . The entanglement of supposedly separate markets impinged, virtually, on every big ticket transaction. If Sophie were living in Dublin and buying a Range Rover, in 2011 the taxes she paid would be going to pay off bad bets made by bad Irish banks who had plunged into the credit markets that, at some point, serviced the big ticket purchases of people like Sophie – as well as the small credit card purchases.
This makes it all the more interesting that economists model a market – rather than the tangle of markets that actually exist – and insist on a highly unrealistic notion of the individual revealing preferences in these simple to disentangle, recognizable markets, when of course they are operating in ways they are not sure of in markets that they cannot overview to make purchases that they ‘prefer’ due to the existential structures in which they are embedded. To trust, then, that they reveal a preference, here, is like understanding the Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg by assuming that a number of soldiers from a number of Southern states had decided, on their own, that it was a good time to take a stroll across a Pennsylvania meadow.
The notion of entanglement helps us see how circulation and production in capitalism have, over the nineteenth and twentieth century, shaped certain ‘ideal types’: producers, middle persons, clerks and lawyers and doctors, consumers, etc. One of the characteristics of those types is that they have learned to navigate the hyperconnectivity of capitalism. But they have not learned, even on the level of economics, to understand it.
Take someone who is supposedly much more sophisticated than Sophie: Larry Summers.
I was struck by one of Summer’s responses in the brief interview with him in the NYT Sunday magazine.
You have been cast as the heavy in documentaries like “Inside Job” and on “Frontline” for sowing the seeds of the economic crisis during the Clinton administration. You were against regulating derivatives and in support of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which significantly relaxed how banks do business. Did they miss the mark by casting you in this light?
"Oh, these are much more complicated issues than those kinds of movies can suggest. Canada, for example, is generally pointed to as a major regulatory success. But it’s got universal banking that goes considerably beyond the Glass-Steagall reforms that happened in the United States. The major accidents in the United States — Bear Stearns, Lehman, Fannie and Freddie — had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. Did we 10 years ago foresee everything that happened with respect to derivatives? Absolutely not."
Summer’s is right that these are complicated issues. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand their complication. The question that is posed, here, is: is there an entanglement between deregulating banks and allowing them to expand their services in all directions so that any crisis they experience will be violently transmitted through the economy and deregulating mortgage markets and derivatives so that they will be free to make riskier investments? And behind this, the larger question: why even have banks if the capital they mobilize is invested, incestuously, in a pyramid of bets about the capital they mobilize? Does this create a perverse incentive to keep the financial services sector from investing in longer range projects – thus creating a huge barrier to long term Research and Development by making it an unattractive investment?
Summers, of course, might have some inkling of these things. But he really can’t connect two things that are modularly separated by his models. Over here we have the separation between investment banks and commercial banks, and over here we have a market in financial instruments that, on the consumer end, deregulates the process of mortgage lending, and, on the other end, creates unregulated opportunities for derivatives of ‘real’ financial instruments to be traded back and forth for profit, but no real social gain. Every economist gets trained, through modeling, to bracket and separate factors that the economist knows, in reality, are interrelated. This is done, firstly, in order to build and make models work. But somewhere along the way, they begin to think that these separations and divisions actually reflect reality. Hence, their policymaking is always done on the principle that the economy is a modular system, without any thought about the fact that it is also a highly interconnected system. Summers simply can’t think through the proposition that he was the architect of a malign coupling – big banks, stinking financial instruments – and thus reverts to the logic of analogy beloved by those pushing bad policy. Analogy pushing has evidently moved on from the glory days, in which our occupation of Iraq was just like occupying Germany after WWII. It is now an excuse for turning a blind eye to the essential and massive dysfunction of financial markets. And this, in turn, manufactures a bigger blind eye, in which our supposedly ‘neo-liberal’ government, virtuously shunning central planning and ‘industrial policy’, actually operates a very intense industrial policy that is centered on promoting financial services.
I wrote the bulk of this in 2012. And in this year, 2021, we still don't see entanglement taken very seriously, even as we live in its virtues and vices. This is where a training in Marx is a virtue, and an ignorance of Marx is a vice - for Marx, at least, had a systematic view of capitalism, while the orthodox political economist has only a mythical monster called a market. And so we go into our world-changing future with this primitive intellectual tool, which is scary.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Music of the spheres
Caillois’ notion of play and games, outlined in Games and Man, attracted an influential attack, “Homo Ludens Revisited”, by Jacques Ehrman in 1968. Ehrman’s article is one of the first really deconstructive articles published in America. It appeared in the Yale French Review, which was establishing itself at the time as the bridgehead of a Tel Quel sensibility in the United States.
The attack took on the underlying binaries, such as Ehrman saw them, in Caillois’ essay. The strategy of showing an underlying incoherence in the binaries, either as an overlap of their extensions or as an insufficient motivation for the arguments based upon them – either as too much or too little – went on to become a common feature of American literary criticism. Deconstruction in America became a form of demasking – which is an especially pertinent term for the criticism of an essay that poses the question of the function of the mask.
Ehrman ostensively directs his attack at Huinzinga, but the emotional onus is really on Caillois. Here’s where we begin:
“Play or seriousness. This alternative is sometimes treated as a dialectic: play and seriousness which, in turn, implies a whole series of others: gratuitousness and/or utility; play and/or work; play and/ or everyday life; the imaginary and/or the real; etc. . . . The concepts here placed in opposition or in parallel are found constantly in Huizinga - as in Caillois, moreover, and in an even more pronounced way, since the latter's definition and classifications of play lead him, as we have indicated, to delimit too categorically the sphere of play by opposing it to the real, to work, and so forth.”
Ehrman develops his criticism in terms of the idea that one cannot call upon the real or the serious to do one’s conceptual work, as these terms are both too vague and too all encompassing. If play exists, it must, by definition, exist in everyday life – and thus play cannot be defined over against everyday life.
“For finally, if the status of "ordinary life," of "reality," is not thrown into question in the very movement of thought given over to play, the theoretical, logical, and anthropological bases on which this thinking is based can only be extremely precarious and contestable. In other words, we are criticizing these authors chiefly and most seriously for considering "reality," the "real," as a given component of the problem, as a referent needing no discussion, as a matter of course, neutral and objective. They define play in opposition to, on the basis of, or in relation to this so-called reality. As the criteria against which play is measured are external to it, its nature remains necessarily second in relation to the "reality" that serves as its yard- stick and is therefore considered "primary" (cf. Huizinga: "Play al- ways represents something," p. 35). But it is legitimate to wonder by what right "reality" may be said to be first, existing prior to its components - play in this case (although it might just as well be some other object of the social sciences) - and serving as their standard”
In moving from criticizing the vagueness of ‘ordinary life” to the implicit claim that play puts it into question, however, Ehrman opens himself up to the charge that some supposition, here, is being assumed rather than argued for. For what does Ehrman mean by the ‘status’ of ordinary life? Is it the status of something that doesn’t exist? And how does this status exist? In what society or culture? If it is the culture that allows Caillois and Huizinga to use these terms (and their allied syntagmas – in particular, work) is unmasked by Ehrman, he perhaps owes us an account of this status and its construction. But no geneology is forthcoming in Ehrman’s essay. Nor is there any attempt to overview Caillois’ essay beyond remarking on the ideologically motivated argument that defines play in opposition to work, games in opposition to ‘the real’, the ludic in opposition to the earnest, etc.
I can grant Ehrman’s objections to the unanalyzed role taken by those oppositions in structuring the argument that Caillois makes, but I am, as well, unconvinced that the contradictions or tensions here vitiate the essay. In fact, the essay produces what I would call doxic moments – moments in which plausibility structures the conceptual given, rather than a logic of definition – in order to use its contradictions to build a history. And this is not an unworthy task, though it is shot through with a Eurocentric and ethnocentric vocabulary.
One should begin by putting Caillois’ essay in the context of his project, about which he wrote extensively: diagonal science. As we have noted, Caillois was attempting to create ‘transversal cuts” across the disciplines to explain or observe phenomena that are, indeed, obscured by the assumption that the division of the sciences corresponds, exhaustively, to the division of the natural kinds. In this, he is making a move that goes sharply against the definition of ‘seriousness’ as something appertaining to our present epistemological arrangements. He is, indeed, willing to risk appearing like a savant freak, a kook. At the base of this effort is Caillois’ sociological interest in the economy of sacrifice. Sacrifice and the sacred are constant preoccupations within his work. This, unfortunately, one would never know from the attack on the micro-level of the play essay by Ehrman.
Like many savant freaks, Caillois had a fondness for new classificatory schemes. The ‘science’ of games was, at the time he wrote his essay (1958), a terra incognita, an unnamed blank space, waiting for the first explorer to name its parts (a colonialist metaphor! And meant to be so, since there is no point in denying Caillois’ inheritance from a colonialist mindset, even as modified by an extensive acquaintanceship with anthropological reports). I have found some of those categories – such as ilynx, or vertigo – extremely helpful.
But what is missing in Caillois is a larger sense of how play or a game self-enclaves. Here, Ehrman is certainly correct, even if his categorical rejection that such a story is possible seems unwarranted. I think that Caillois can be usefully supplemented by Simmel’s hints about the three encircling institutions in modernity: the law, education, and money. Sphere calls to sphere, circle calls to circle – or evokes further circles, to use Caillois’ term. About which I will write more in my next post.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Amie's site
In the seventies, Roland Barthes turned to the particular and the neutral, towards fascination and love, which altogether formed the third stage in his ‘semiological adventure.’ Here, political engagement gave place to a hedonism that was also, of course, an openness to pain, for pain is the vulnerability intrinsic to pleasure, the complement as well as the adversary, the deepening and that out of which sweetness comes as a sort of startling new premise into the world – for if the world holds such sweetness, surely it must be a different and stranger place than one took it for. What one took it for was indifferent – because it is indifference, rather than pain, that is the real opposite of pleasure, its real annihilation. Pain and pleasure can both be unbearable, but indifference is all too bearable.
Pain, then, is also part of the process. In particular, the pain Barthes felt was the loss of the person he most loved his mother. The first photo in his 1975 book, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, is not of himself, but of his mother, alone, on the beach. In 1979, after she had died, Barthes looked back on that photo in La Chambre Claire. In section 25, he sets the scene of arranging photos of his mother after her death, writing that he did not ‘love’ any of them except the one “that I had published where one sees my mother, young, walking on the beach at Landres, and where I ‘rediscovered’ her walk, her health, her radiance…” The rest, however, were tugged by indifference, or what Barthes calls history – that space in which the ones we know are only, only jurisdictionally recognizable – one may testify that these are photos of one’s mother, but there is a fissure between that testimony and the mother one knows.
In this book on photography, Barthes develops the idea of the punctum. The punctum is another name for Barthes’ beloved ‘detail’ – the effect of the real, this time seen outside the framework of that eternal couple, nature and culture. The punctum is contrasted with the studium. We may read, or scan, a photo, but what interests us, he claims, is the moment when something is released from the picture, “like an arrow, and comes to pierce me.” The cut or wound of that arrow, and the point of the arrow, are both designated by punctum – it is the base of punctuation and of puncturing. It is the pick, the little hole, the little spot. The stain.
All of which brings me to the point of this post. My friend Amie died last year. I wrote about this in a post in December. I have no photograph of Amie – in fact, I don’t know what she looked like, I have her voice in her emails and comments but not her physical presence of its grain – and yet I have a stong and overwhelming sense that we were intellectual companions, and that what I was doing, in Limited Inc, trying to assemble a book, The Human Limit, had to do, by every sort of coincidence and sign, with her project and her reflections. Her project was writing a treatise of some kind on soundtracks, which would bring together her love – her taste – for certain films and her fascination with sound as meaning and accompaniment.
The puncture created by her death in my world may be a small detail – the hole that punctures a balloon may be only the width of the point of a needle – but it is a telling detail to me, a proportion of volume to loss that still astonishes me. And I resent death not only for taking Amie, but also for taking her unfairly, before she had her chance. I don’t forgive the world this.
In the face of that loss, Amie’s friends have set up a blog on which some of her writing is being put up. The site is called Peirates. Mark it reader.
Pain, then, is also part of the process. In particular, the pain Barthes felt was the loss of the person he most loved his mother. The first photo in his 1975 book, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, is not of himself, but of his mother, alone, on the beach. In 1979, after she had died, Barthes looked back on that photo in La Chambre Claire. In section 25, he sets the scene of arranging photos of his mother after her death, writing that he did not ‘love’ any of them except the one “that I had published where one sees my mother, young, walking on the beach at Landres, and where I ‘rediscovered’ her walk, her health, her radiance…” The rest, however, were tugged by indifference, or what Barthes calls history – that space in which the ones we know are only, only jurisdictionally recognizable – one may testify that these are photos of one’s mother, but there is a fissure between that testimony and the mother one knows.
In this book on photography, Barthes develops the idea of the punctum. The punctum is another name for Barthes’ beloved ‘detail’ – the effect of the real, this time seen outside the framework of that eternal couple, nature and culture. The punctum is contrasted with the studium. We may read, or scan, a photo, but what interests us, he claims, is the moment when something is released from the picture, “like an arrow, and comes to pierce me.” The cut or wound of that arrow, and the point of the arrow, are both designated by punctum – it is the base of punctuation and of puncturing. It is the pick, the little hole, the little spot. The stain.
All of which brings me to the point of this post. My friend Amie died last year. I wrote about this in a post in December. I have no photograph of Amie – in fact, I don’t know what she looked like, I have her voice in her emails and comments but not her physical presence of its grain – and yet I have a stong and overwhelming sense that we were intellectual companions, and that what I was doing, in Limited Inc, trying to assemble a book, The Human Limit, had to do, by every sort of coincidence and sign, with her project and her reflections. Her project was writing a treatise of some kind on soundtracks, which would bring together her love – her taste – for certain films and her fascination with sound as meaning and accompaniment.
The puncture created by her death in my world may be a small detail – the hole that punctures a balloon may be only the width of the point of a needle – but it is a telling detail to me, a proportion of volume to loss that still astonishes me. And I resent death not only for taking Amie, but also for taking her unfairly, before she had her chance. I don’t forgive the world this.
In the face of that loss, Amie’s friends have set up a blog on which some of her writing is being put up. The site is called Peirates. Mark it reader.
Monday, May 09, 2011
The dirty decade(s)
I find it cruelly amusing that the media and the power elite in America, at the moment, are having a fake wonder moment - why, OBL was in Pakistan of all places! I can only compare this to discovering that the tooth fairy is a fake, or that no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Did anybody, year after year, think he was anywhere else? I, luckily for my told-you-so tendencies, although unluckily for my mental health, have long kept a blog, Limited Inc, and from the end of 2001 until the assassination of OBL, I have had no doubt about the status of the tooth fairy or of Osama bin Laden.
So why was I so sure? well, for one thing, I did not rely on the American media for my news. During the Bush years, a whole new method of managing consent was devised, in which the media could continue to pretend they maintained a critical function towards our governors whilst doffing their hats, bowing and scraping, and generally retailing nonsense. They straddled servility and 'freedom' by displacing the news into another time zone, one in which important events were reported years after they had happened, and in fact years after the relevant players in the media knew that they had happened. This technique proved so successful that it has been deployed to report the current economic crisis.
In any case, shortly after, or even during, the Kunduz airlift in 2001, the newspapers and the tv knew that it happened. They just didnt emphasize it. Thus, our narrative of the Great War in Afghanistan is missing a crucial piece. In our narrative, the Americans and their heroic allies, Pakistani and Afghan alike, advanced relentlessly against the arch-fiend Osama and the Taliban, mopped up territory with that supreme ease for which our GIs are celebrated, and had Osama all cornered in his hidey hole when he found a magic poney and escaped, perhaps to the North Pole, perhaps to Tahiti. In reality, the winter of 2001 showed, in miniature, that we were lead by a group that combined the cynicism of the street-corner pimp with the competence of the Three Stooges trying to screw in a lightbulb. Rumsfeld's generals, a lickspittle crew, withheld American troops even though they had them in positions where they could have advanced and, say, hardened the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was well perceived by all players in the area, including India. It was simply not perceived by Americans, who still didn't understand what had been spawned in December, 2000 by our country club Supreme Court. Meanwhile, as Seymour Hersch wrote in one of the first articles about Kunduz, the administration did this: American soldiers combined with irregulars from the Northern Alliance surrounded the the northern hill town of Kunduz, which was on the way to Tora Bora. Embarrassingly, our friend and ally, Pakistan, had, while agreeing to all our Commandante's terms so stirringly laid out for them - we wasn't taking no shit after 9/11! - calmly pocketed American money and went on doing what it had been doing before 9/11, supporting the Taliban and the Taliban's ally, Al Q. Thus, Kunduz contained more than a peck of Pakistani SSI men. What to do, what to do? The gulls in America might not understand the friendly relationship we had with Pakistan, but our governor's did. Thus, American soldiers were treated to the sight of Pakistani aircraft lifting out whoever the fuck they wanted to from Kunduz. And the Bush administration than mounted its usual m.o. - lie blatantly. As Hersch reports:
"Even before the siege ended, however, a puzzling series of reports appeared in the Times and in other publications, quoting Northern Alliance officials who claimed that Pakistani airplanes had flown into Kunduz to evacuate the Pakistanis there. American and Pakistani officials refused to confirm the reports. On November 16th, when journalists asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the reports of rescue aircraft, he was dismissive. “Well, if we see them, we shoot them down,” he said. Five days later, Rumsfeld declared, “Any idea that those people should be let loose on any basis at all to leave that country and to go bring terror to other countries and destabilize other countries is unacceptable.” At a Pentagon news conference on Monday, November 26th, the day after Kunduz fell, General Richard B. Myers, of the Air Force, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked about the reports. The General did not directly answer the question but stated, “The runway there is not usable. I mean, there are segments of it that are usable. They’re too short for your standard transport aircraft. So we’re not sure where the reports are coming from.”"
Well, if the big and the powerful said it, and if they are, gosh almighty, generals too - why, who are we to believe our own peepers? However the gulls in America swallowed this bullshit, however, the players in Afghanistan and Pakistan had their eyes opened. For what possible reason would American generals not only not order their soldiers to adhere to the first rule of invading a country, but allow Pakistan to actually airlift out the very people Americans had supposedly come to kill?
Definitely Osama bin Laden, in his hideout, got the message loud and clear: not only would the administration not be averse to him getting 'lost' in Pakistan, but they would even lie and send up fog and generally pretend that this hadn't happened. It turned out that things went even better than planned for all participants: Pakistan got its aid, OBL and the Taliban got their bases, Bush got his GWOT (allowing him to invade Iraq, the one country in the Middle East that did not have its hand in OBL's pie), and the American media got to bask in being all patriotic and shit. This is an act they are still all about today, although they've moved on: now patriotism and shit means destroying entitlements for the middle class cause we - that is, we happy few, we who have been somewhat advantaged by TARP and the nine trillion in low interest/no interest loans handed out merrily by the Fed - can't afford them any more! Nh uh.
The transition period between democracy and plutocracy is always dirty. It is strewn with lies, betrayal, mass murder, and the corruption of the very fonts of information - and that is what we see all over the former democracies at present. In the U.S., these things are simply writ larger. At one time, in the 90s, people spoke of the new gilded age. 9/11 put a stop at least to that. This is the dirty era. It has left its unforgettable taste in every mouth, on every tongue. And we are not through with it yet.
So why was I so sure? well, for one thing, I did not rely on the American media for my news. During the Bush years, a whole new method of managing consent was devised, in which the media could continue to pretend they maintained a critical function towards our governors whilst doffing their hats, bowing and scraping, and generally retailing nonsense. They straddled servility and 'freedom' by displacing the news into another time zone, one in which important events were reported years after they had happened, and in fact years after the relevant players in the media knew that they had happened. This technique proved so successful that it has been deployed to report the current economic crisis.
In any case, shortly after, or even during, the Kunduz airlift in 2001, the newspapers and the tv knew that it happened. They just didnt emphasize it. Thus, our narrative of the Great War in Afghanistan is missing a crucial piece. In our narrative, the Americans and their heroic allies, Pakistani and Afghan alike, advanced relentlessly against the arch-fiend Osama and the Taliban, mopped up territory with that supreme ease for which our GIs are celebrated, and had Osama all cornered in his hidey hole when he found a magic poney and escaped, perhaps to the North Pole, perhaps to Tahiti. In reality, the winter of 2001 showed, in miniature, that we were lead by a group that combined the cynicism of the street-corner pimp with the competence of the Three Stooges trying to screw in a lightbulb. Rumsfeld's generals, a lickspittle crew, withheld American troops even though they had them in positions where they could have advanced and, say, hardened the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was well perceived by all players in the area, including India. It was simply not perceived by Americans, who still didn't understand what had been spawned in December, 2000 by our country club Supreme Court. Meanwhile, as Seymour Hersch wrote in one of the first articles about Kunduz, the administration did this: American soldiers combined with irregulars from the Northern Alliance surrounded the the northern hill town of Kunduz, which was on the way to Tora Bora. Embarrassingly, our friend and ally, Pakistan, had, while agreeing to all our Commandante's terms so stirringly laid out for them - we wasn't taking no shit after 9/11! - calmly pocketed American money and went on doing what it had been doing before 9/11, supporting the Taliban and the Taliban's ally, Al Q. Thus, Kunduz contained more than a peck of Pakistani SSI men. What to do, what to do? The gulls in America might not understand the friendly relationship we had with Pakistan, but our governor's did. Thus, American soldiers were treated to the sight of Pakistani aircraft lifting out whoever the fuck they wanted to from Kunduz. And the Bush administration than mounted its usual m.o. - lie blatantly. As Hersch reports:
"Even before the siege ended, however, a puzzling series of reports appeared in the Times and in other publications, quoting Northern Alliance officials who claimed that Pakistani airplanes had flown into Kunduz to evacuate the Pakistanis there. American and Pakistani officials refused to confirm the reports. On November 16th, when journalists asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the reports of rescue aircraft, he was dismissive. “Well, if we see them, we shoot them down,” he said. Five days later, Rumsfeld declared, “Any idea that those people should be let loose on any basis at all to leave that country and to go bring terror to other countries and destabilize other countries is unacceptable.” At a Pentagon news conference on Monday, November 26th, the day after Kunduz fell, General Richard B. Myers, of the Air Force, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked about the reports. The General did not directly answer the question but stated, “The runway there is not usable. I mean, there are segments of it that are usable. They’re too short for your standard transport aircraft. So we’re not sure where the reports are coming from.”"
Well, if the big and the powerful said it, and if they are, gosh almighty, generals too - why, who are we to believe our own peepers? However the gulls in America swallowed this bullshit, however, the players in Afghanistan and Pakistan had their eyes opened. For what possible reason would American generals not only not order their soldiers to adhere to the first rule of invading a country, but allow Pakistan to actually airlift out the very people Americans had supposedly come to kill?
Definitely Osama bin Laden, in his hideout, got the message loud and clear: not only would the administration not be averse to him getting 'lost' in Pakistan, but they would even lie and send up fog and generally pretend that this hadn't happened. It turned out that things went even better than planned for all participants: Pakistan got its aid, OBL and the Taliban got their bases, Bush got his GWOT (allowing him to invade Iraq, the one country in the Middle East that did not have its hand in OBL's pie), and the American media got to bask in being all patriotic and shit. This is an act they are still all about today, although they've moved on: now patriotism and shit means destroying entitlements for the middle class cause we - that is, we happy few, we who have been somewhat advantaged by TARP and the nine trillion in low interest/no interest loans handed out merrily by the Fed - can't afford them any more! Nh uh.
The transition period between democracy and plutocracy is always dirty. It is strewn with lies, betrayal, mass murder, and the corruption of the very fonts of information - and that is what we see all over the former democracies at present. In the U.S., these things are simply writ larger. At one time, in the 90s, people spoke of the new gilded age. 9/11 put a stop at least to that. This is the dirty era. It has left its unforgettable taste in every mouth, on every tongue. And we are not through with it yet.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Deleuze, Guattari, Caillois and the lobster
On page 53 or Mille Plateaux, there is a picture of a lobster under one of the puzzling titles, all attached to a puzzling Chronotope, in that loaded gun of a book – a book that translates universal history into the Pynchonian idiom of the shaggy dog story.
I was not thinking of that book when I began my own lobster’s tale, but surely Geoffroy’s homard is not so far away from D and G’s appropriation of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger. The story is told in the Professor’s voice (and remember, that voice becomes more and more animal as the tale moves on), and the choice of the lobster is emphasized from the beginning:
Dieu est un Homard ou une double-pince, un double-bind. Ce
n'est pas seulement les strates qui vont par deux au moins, mais
d'une autre façon chaque strate est double ( elle aura elle-même
plusieurs couches ). Chaque strate présente en effet des phénomènes
constitutifs de double articulation.
(God is a lobster or a double-claw, a double bind. It is not only the strata which pair up into twos at the very least, but in another fashion each strata is double (it will itself have many levels). Each strata presents, in effect, phenomena constitutive of a double articulation.)
One has to remember that Professor Challenger’s assertions are not signed by Deleuze and Guattari – no more than Socrates’ are signed by Plato. And who is this Professor Challenger? “The professor besides was neither a geologist nor a biologist, not even a linguist, an ethnologist, or a psychoanalyst, and it has been a long time that we have forgotten just what his specialty was.”
The tale of the lobster, or of analogies in science, is indeed a tale of specializations. In a wonderfully synoptic passage in his Philosophy of Money, Simmel writes that, in the modern condition, there are three inescapable large social factors – Mauss might have said total social facts – which engage all citizens: Law, Money, and “Intellectuality” – education/science. The tale as told by Simmel would go like this: where the early modern person could well escape the law (there was no real developed system of policing in Europe before the 18th century, and it took Napoleon’s troops to introduce a real police network in the German and Italian countryside in the 19th century), and could as well escape education, and could live largely on barter and home grown products (thus avoiding, for the most part, monetary transactions), it was impossible to escape religion. Modernization made religion escapable – in fact, one of the reasons the question of religion became so heated, and existed as a long time as one of the essential liberal parameters, was just the question of its escapability. But at the end of the modernization process, there was a new order of social factors that encircle the individual. One of them was the massive fact of education and science.
And it is by this route that we proceed to the science of analogies and exactly what kind of specialization such a science entails.
Geoffroy and Fourier, to be sure, were working in different intellectual domains in the 1820s, but they both inserted a notion of analogy that pointed to function, and operated through distortion – that is, the distortion of the impressions of common sense. Common sense sees the lobster crawling about on his belly – Geoffrey sees the lobster crawling about on his side. Fourier saw that underneath the homogenous desire is a world of perverse ones, a world that requires analogical vision. Analogy, thus, is not simply surface resemblence – for the surface is another strata, to speak like Professor Challenger, whereas the deep structure has a different form and content.
This is an intellectual discovery that is continually being made by Challengers and Columbuses. Among the discoverers is Roger Caillois.
Caillois is a man whose ‘specialization’ has also been long forgotten. Surrealist, student of Mauss, companion of Bataille, enemy of Borges, philosopher – and the sole practitioner of diagonal science, which takes up the utopian methodology of Fourier and seeks to reknit the disjecta membra of the world, or the map of the world, that has been dissected and allotted to various scientific disciplines. Caillois was fond of symmetries, crystals, and of metaphors that crystallized commonalities that are rejected by all the scientific specialists, each equipped with one lens of the great fly eye that views the entirety of the world, its formulas and their flow, each adjusted to a strictly delimited tissue of experience.
“Man, for the price of a thousand triumphs, a thousand victories ove rthe most specious ambushes, has without doubt distributed the givens of the universe according to the most fecund, the most coherent, and the most pertinent classifications. But this perspective surely does not exhaust the diverse combinations that are possible. It leaves to the side the transversal progresses of nature, of which one observes the power in the most far apart of domains, and of which I am going to give some poor examples. Such progresses straddle the classifications in use. Science can do little to restrain them as they are by definition interdisciplinary. They demand, besides, in order ot appear, the approaching of givens that are distant from each other, of which the study is pursued by specialists necessarily living in constant ignorance of each other’s work. However, one cannot exclude that these transversal cuts fill an indispensable role in explaining these phenomena which, in isolation, appear each time as aberrant, but of which the signification would appear for our better perception if one dared to align these exceptions…” [O, 482, my translation]
,
I was not thinking of that book when I began my own lobster’s tale, but surely Geoffroy’s homard is not so far away from D and G’s appropriation of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger. The story is told in the Professor’s voice (and remember, that voice becomes more and more animal as the tale moves on), and the choice of the lobster is emphasized from the beginning:
Dieu est un Homard ou une double-pince, un double-bind. Ce
n'est pas seulement les strates qui vont par deux au moins, mais
d'une autre façon chaque strate est double ( elle aura elle-même
plusieurs couches ). Chaque strate présente en effet des phénomènes
constitutifs de double articulation.
(God is a lobster or a double-claw, a double bind. It is not only the strata which pair up into twos at the very least, but in another fashion each strata is double (it will itself have many levels). Each strata presents, in effect, phenomena constitutive of a double articulation.)
One has to remember that Professor Challenger’s assertions are not signed by Deleuze and Guattari – no more than Socrates’ are signed by Plato. And who is this Professor Challenger? “The professor besides was neither a geologist nor a biologist, not even a linguist, an ethnologist, or a psychoanalyst, and it has been a long time that we have forgotten just what his specialty was.”
The tale of the lobster, or of analogies in science, is indeed a tale of specializations. In a wonderfully synoptic passage in his Philosophy of Money, Simmel writes that, in the modern condition, there are three inescapable large social factors – Mauss might have said total social facts – which engage all citizens: Law, Money, and “Intellectuality” – education/science. The tale as told by Simmel would go like this: where the early modern person could well escape the law (there was no real developed system of policing in Europe before the 18th century, and it took Napoleon’s troops to introduce a real police network in the German and Italian countryside in the 19th century), and could as well escape education, and could live largely on barter and home grown products (thus avoiding, for the most part, monetary transactions), it was impossible to escape religion. Modernization made religion escapable – in fact, one of the reasons the question of religion became so heated, and existed as a long time as one of the essential liberal parameters, was just the question of its escapability. But at the end of the modernization process, there was a new order of social factors that encircle the individual. One of them was the massive fact of education and science.
And it is by this route that we proceed to the science of analogies and exactly what kind of specialization such a science entails.
Geoffroy and Fourier, to be sure, were working in different intellectual domains in the 1820s, but they both inserted a notion of analogy that pointed to function, and operated through distortion – that is, the distortion of the impressions of common sense. Common sense sees the lobster crawling about on his belly – Geoffrey sees the lobster crawling about on his side. Fourier saw that underneath the homogenous desire is a world of perverse ones, a world that requires analogical vision. Analogy, thus, is not simply surface resemblence – for the surface is another strata, to speak like Professor Challenger, whereas the deep structure has a different form and content.
This is an intellectual discovery that is continually being made by Challengers and Columbuses. Among the discoverers is Roger Caillois.
Caillois is a man whose ‘specialization’ has also been long forgotten. Surrealist, student of Mauss, companion of Bataille, enemy of Borges, philosopher – and the sole practitioner of diagonal science, which takes up the utopian methodology of Fourier and seeks to reknit the disjecta membra of the world, or the map of the world, that has been dissected and allotted to various scientific disciplines. Caillois was fond of symmetries, crystals, and of metaphors that crystallized commonalities that are rejected by all the scientific specialists, each equipped with one lens of the great fly eye that views the entirety of the world, its formulas and their flow, each adjusted to a strictly delimited tissue of experience.
“Man, for the price of a thousand triumphs, a thousand victories ove rthe most specious ambushes, has without doubt distributed the givens of the universe according to the most fecund, the most coherent, and the most pertinent classifications. But this perspective surely does not exhaust the diverse combinations that are possible. It leaves to the side the transversal progresses of nature, of which one observes the power in the most far apart of domains, and of which I am going to give some poor examples. Such progresses straddle the classifications in use. Science can do little to restrain them as they are by definition interdisciplinary. They demand, besides, in order ot appear, the approaching of givens that are distant from each other, of which the study is pursued by specialists necessarily living in constant ignorance of each other’s work. However, one cannot exclude that these transversal cuts fill an indispensable role in explaining these phenomena which, in isolation, appear each time as aberrant, but of which the signification would appear for our better perception if one dared to align these exceptions…” [O, 482, my translation]
,
Thursday, May 05, 2011
A people's park
I live near the aristocratic parks. If I bike South for ten minutes, I hit the Tuileries, and in fifteen minutes, more or less, I can hit Luxembourg. These parks are watched over by statues, or ponds at the center of which one finds a baroque fountain, and are herded by the orangeries or palais or hotels to which they once formed a unit. The way the parks should be experienced is evident in the ground plan, laid out by those architects, gardeners and urbanists – like Perrault at Versailles – who adapted the grounds to the royal perspective. But the point was not just to keep these gardens for the king. There’s a famous story about this:
“When the gardens of the Tuileries were replanted by Lenostre, Colbert wanted to close them to the people, who for more than a century had become used to strolling there; he went to give orders to that affect, accompanied by Perrault, who said to him, as they were walking
-You would never believe, monsieur, the respect that everyone, down to the petit bourgeoisie, has for this garden; not only women and children would never think of plucking a single flower, but they wouldn’t even touch them. They stroll about there like well behaved people, the gardeners can vouch for it. It would be a public affliction not to come here to stroll around.” And to Colbert’s objection, Perrault replied: There comes here… persons who have left their sick bed to take the air; there comes those who speak of business affairs, of marriages, and of everything that can be treated better in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary to go in the future and make appointments. I am persuaded that the gardens of the king are so great and spacious in order that all their children can stroll there.” (Musee des familles, 212 – my translation)
Similarly, the Bois de Boulogne, which I can only get to by metro or bus, was once a royal hunting preserve. And though the last king that hunted there lost his head, and though I associate it as much with Swann, damning the Verdurins and Odette as he rambled in it one night, after being excluded from the “clan”, I am aware of its royal past when I walk on its paths.
Sunday, I visited another sort of park altogether – the Buttes-Chaumont. The sign tells me that the park was designed under Napoleon III, and opened in 1867 as, according to Luisa Lumida, an extension of that years Universal Exposition. The area was at the time in a worker’s district. While Napoleon III was no democrat, by 1867 the spirit of the aristocracy had gone into terminal decline. Beginning in 1830, when the revanchist noblesse played their last turn, and lost, the nobility had lost its real place in France, and by 1867 it was utterly caught up with the corruption and money making schemes that marked the final period of Napoleon III’s rule. By the time Proust’s chronicle takes them up, around 1900, the aristocracy was well on its way to becoming a mere collection of celebrities – indeed, Odette is the emblem of that transformation. And so they would continue to warp in the rays of the new media. Zola, in a way, foretold what was going to happen in the horse racing scene in Nana, where nobles and great wealth are both caught up in the spell of her estrus, while Nana, the resplendent child of an alcoholic and a cripple from the Paris slums, grows metaphorically to giant size and swallows France’s virility – its railroads, steel, agriculture – as she spends the money that is showered upon her.
Zola was as little a democrat as Napoleon III. As the Buttes-Chaumont was designed as a people’s park, Zola showed exactly what happened when the people crashed the gates of culture in L’assomoir. There, at the wedding of Nana’s mother, Gervaise, the wedding party, out of pure idleness, goes to the Louvre. Oh these laboring classes! Once there, they discover to their great amusement, that the walls are covered with paintings of tits.
This party is surely one of the great moments in the Gnostic history of modernism, a moment of abundant intersignage. The great compact that had held from the Renaissance and even through the French Revolution had surrounded art with a neutralizing and glorious aura, variously interpreted as sublimation or sublimity, the brunt of which was that these representations, these colors and forms, these sculptures, these poems, were the higher things. Yes, British dilettanti could nudge each other when gazing at the phalli uncovered at Pompeii, not to speak of the frescoes there, but the erotic was meant to be felt only under the strata, so to speak, of classical scholarship – the great lava of philosophy and learning pouring out from Wincklemann and the Germans. And then the time of the Whig Lords came to an end, and with it a respectability settled over London, which had already received the shock of the puritans in the 17th century. This is why, I think, London seemed a little strange to me after Paris – there is no tribe of accompanying nude statues in London. They do not lurk over the great buildings, or around the corner, in the parks. Instead, there is, at best, hatchet faced clothed statues and nudes that are painful, painful allegories. Thus, Zola’s Paris proles already had the experience of tits and ass in the streets. But these tits and ass were still faintly ringed with the noble disdain for prole appetites, all of which comes crashing down in the age of Expositions and daguerrotypes, when one can purchase, for one’s wanking pleasure, less inapproachable pics of nudes in the appropriately louche tabac, and it becomes obvious that it is all naked forked humans, nothing special, and something to touch. Zola is not at all happy with this situation. And surely in a sense he is right – whether art tries to ‘transgress’ or is rolled out in the Frommer’s Guidebook or Art History 101 as something to photograph reverently, it is under the spell of having its spell broken.
All of which leads to this: when I entered the Buttes-Chaumont, I immediately felt at home. Here, there are no rococo marbles to police our mildly libidinous pleasures, and we see, grouped on various sloping lawns, families, friends and lovers, all clumped together separately, eating or drinking. I recognized the spirit of this park – it is the same spirit that presides over Zilker Park in Austin. It is the spirit of hotdogs and burgers on the grill. The attraction, here, is the mild natural aberration of a hill and a grotto and an artificial pond. True, one thing was missing – radio stations in France have still not discovered the joy of playing top 40 songs on ace speakers to a crowd that never asked to hear them and would probably like them to leave, even in spite of the free t shirts being handed out. Perhaps some blessed, paternalistic abridgement of all our freedoms forbids this – we know the French!
I was quite quite happy. Then I went to a nearby café and had a beer.
“When the gardens of the Tuileries were replanted by Lenostre, Colbert wanted to close them to the people, who for more than a century had become used to strolling there; he went to give orders to that affect, accompanied by Perrault, who said to him, as they were walking
-You would never believe, monsieur, the respect that everyone, down to the petit bourgeoisie, has for this garden; not only women and children would never think of plucking a single flower, but they wouldn’t even touch them. They stroll about there like well behaved people, the gardeners can vouch for it. It would be a public affliction not to come here to stroll around.” And to Colbert’s objection, Perrault replied: There comes here… persons who have left their sick bed to take the air; there comes those who speak of business affairs, of marriages, and of everything that can be treated better in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary to go in the future and make appointments. I am persuaded that the gardens of the king are so great and spacious in order that all their children can stroll there.” (Musee des familles, 212 – my translation)
Similarly, the Bois de Boulogne, which I can only get to by metro or bus, was once a royal hunting preserve. And though the last king that hunted there lost his head, and though I associate it as much with Swann, damning the Verdurins and Odette as he rambled in it one night, after being excluded from the “clan”, I am aware of its royal past when I walk on its paths.
Sunday, I visited another sort of park altogether – the Buttes-Chaumont. The sign tells me that the park was designed under Napoleon III, and opened in 1867 as, according to Luisa Lumida, an extension of that years Universal Exposition. The area was at the time in a worker’s district. While Napoleon III was no democrat, by 1867 the spirit of the aristocracy had gone into terminal decline. Beginning in 1830, when the revanchist noblesse played their last turn, and lost, the nobility had lost its real place in France, and by 1867 it was utterly caught up with the corruption and money making schemes that marked the final period of Napoleon III’s rule. By the time Proust’s chronicle takes them up, around 1900, the aristocracy was well on its way to becoming a mere collection of celebrities – indeed, Odette is the emblem of that transformation. And so they would continue to warp in the rays of the new media. Zola, in a way, foretold what was going to happen in the horse racing scene in Nana, where nobles and great wealth are both caught up in the spell of her estrus, while Nana, the resplendent child of an alcoholic and a cripple from the Paris slums, grows metaphorically to giant size and swallows France’s virility – its railroads, steel, agriculture – as she spends the money that is showered upon her.
Zola was as little a democrat as Napoleon III. As the Buttes-Chaumont was designed as a people’s park, Zola showed exactly what happened when the people crashed the gates of culture in L’assomoir. There, at the wedding of Nana’s mother, Gervaise, the wedding party, out of pure idleness, goes to the Louvre. Oh these laboring classes! Once there, they discover to their great amusement, that the walls are covered with paintings of tits.
This party is surely one of the great moments in the Gnostic history of modernism, a moment of abundant intersignage. The great compact that had held from the Renaissance and even through the French Revolution had surrounded art with a neutralizing and glorious aura, variously interpreted as sublimation or sublimity, the brunt of which was that these representations, these colors and forms, these sculptures, these poems, were the higher things. Yes, British dilettanti could nudge each other when gazing at the phalli uncovered at Pompeii, not to speak of the frescoes there, but the erotic was meant to be felt only under the strata, so to speak, of classical scholarship – the great lava of philosophy and learning pouring out from Wincklemann and the Germans. And then the time of the Whig Lords came to an end, and with it a respectability settled over London, which had already received the shock of the puritans in the 17th century. This is why, I think, London seemed a little strange to me after Paris – there is no tribe of accompanying nude statues in London. They do not lurk over the great buildings, or around the corner, in the parks. Instead, there is, at best, hatchet faced clothed statues and nudes that are painful, painful allegories. Thus, Zola’s Paris proles already had the experience of tits and ass in the streets. But these tits and ass were still faintly ringed with the noble disdain for prole appetites, all of which comes crashing down in the age of Expositions and daguerrotypes, when one can purchase, for one’s wanking pleasure, less inapproachable pics of nudes in the appropriately louche tabac, and it becomes obvious that it is all naked forked humans, nothing special, and something to touch. Zola is not at all happy with this situation. And surely in a sense he is right – whether art tries to ‘transgress’ or is rolled out in the Frommer’s Guidebook or Art History 101 as something to photograph reverently, it is under the spell of having its spell broken.
All of which leads to this: when I entered the Buttes-Chaumont, I immediately felt at home. Here, there are no rococo marbles to police our mildly libidinous pleasures, and we see, grouped on various sloping lawns, families, friends and lovers, all clumped together separately, eating or drinking. I recognized the spirit of this park – it is the same spirit that presides over Zilker Park in Austin. It is the spirit of hotdogs and burgers on the grill. The attraction, here, is the mild natural aberration of a hill and a grotto and an artificial pond. True, one thing was missing – radio stations in France have still not discovered the joy of playing top 40 songs on ace speakers to a crowd that never asked to hear them and would probably like them to leave, even in spite of the free t shirts being handed out. Perhaps some blessed, paternalistic abridgement of all our freedoms forbids this – we know the French!
I was quite quite happy. Then I went to a nearby café and had a beer.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
cherchez the lobster 3
It wasn't a rock
Rock Lobster...!
Fourier wrote of analogy as a calculus in Le nouveau monde industrial:
“It is necessary to prelude this demonstration by some details of analogy. Our beautiful souls in making such pathos out of the great book of nature, its eloquent voice and beauties, don’t know how to explain a single line of that great book. For us, it is only a desolate enigma without the calculus of analogy that decomposes all the mysteries, and very pleasantly too, for it unveils all the hypocries and snatches off the civilized mask, It is with good reason that Bernardin de St Pierre names them frivolous and thespian virtues.“
The calculus of analogies, it turns out, is a mélange of folklore, etymology, and allegory – and yet it teases the brain that is aware it has been thrust, indeed, into the new industrial world, one in which we live among structures that seem to be built all independently, and yet continually form a pattern. A pattern of European cities that was decrypted, of course, by Allied and German pilots in the 1940s, and thereafter by the planners who carried the target diagrams in their heads as they drew lines on paper that became the great highways along which vehicles could drive to transport goods, to bring the worker to work or the vacationer to the beach, and that could, ultimately, empty the city when the bombs or missiles dropped.
That calculus forms one parameter of the dream of a universal science made up of an eccentric traversal of the sciences, trolling for resemblences.
In the definitive, 1937 version of his “The Praying Mantis”, Roger Caillois (whose candidate for the universal science he later calls ‘diagonal science”) investigates the insect within the precincts of two different registers. One of them involves an investigation of the kinds of mantis, its form and its characteristics. In other words, this is an investigation in animal ethology. On the other hand, Caillois investigates how the mantis has figured in the belief systems of various cultures around the globe. This research is recognizably the kind of comparative anthropology that his teacher, Marcel Mauss, practiced. What makes this double register unusual is that Caillois is searching for what we would now call a sociobiological approach, or level. The fact that the praying mantis female eats the male, sometimes in the act of coitus, is an ethological fact that irradiates out in symbols and meanings in various cultures that can be observed and collected by the anthropologist. In Caillois’ version of this search, it is not just overt references to the mantis that he seeks, but all kinds of narratives concerning devouring women, succubi, Giftmadchen (women who are loaded with a poison and whose embraces poison their partner – an oddly persistent motif in the James Bond films), and other femmes fatales, with the point being that we have, here, not simply a coincidence, but a unity. The unity arises, here, as evidence of much the same sort of thing that Geoffroy supposed he was getting at by looking at the unity of the body plan of the lobster and the vertebrate – that is, it arises as part of the of greater biological unity of descent. This biological function survives in the instinctual level of human beings (Caillois, at this point, adheres to a colonial anthropology that ascribes to the ‘primitive’ some closer relation to the instincts, as though the culture of the tribe had not developed the techniques of sublimation that the ‘civilized man’ possesses. This is a derivative of what Johannes Fabian calls ‘allochrony’, in which different ages or times are attributed to synchronously co-existing societies). Here is a key passage from Caillois’ essay:
“The present study seems to carry the confirmation of fact to his [Bergson’s] theoretical views: the praying mantis presents itself like the sort of objective idogram materially realizing in the exterior world the most tendacious virtualities of affectivity. There is nothing to be astonished about: from the behavior of the insect to the consciousness of man, in this homogenous universe, the path is continous. The mantis devours its male during coitus, man imagines feminine creatures devouring him after attracting him into their arms. There is a difference from the act to the representation, but the same biological orientation organizes the parallelism and determines the convergence. [My translation, Caillois Oeuvres 2008, 203]
It is against this background, one in which Caillois’ essay and later work (which I want to examine in another post) fit into a certain cultural pattern that shifted the great sorting terms of nature and culture, that we should understood Barthes’ allergy to analogy. Here are the first two paragraphs of “The demon of analogy”, a fragment in Barthes book on himself:
Saussure’s bete noire was the arbitrary (nature of the sign). His [Barthes] is analogy. The analogical arts (cinema, photography), the analogical methods (academic criticism, for instance) are discredited. Why? Because analogy implies an affect of ‘nature’, it constitutes the ‘natural’ as the source of truth: and what also adds to the curse of analogy is that it is irrepressible (Re, 1637 II): as soon as a form is seen, it is necessary that it resembles something. Humanity seems condemned to the analogy, which is to say, in the end, to Nature. From whence we find the effort of painters, of writers to escape it. How? By two contrary excesses, or, if you prefer, two ironies, which puts Analogy in derision, be it in feigning a respect that is spectacularly flat (which is the copy that saves itself), be it in deforming regularly – that is, according to rules – the mimed object (which is anamorphosis, V, 44 II).
Outside of these transgressions, which are opposed benificiently to perfid Analogy, there is simple structural correspondence, homology, which reduces the reference of the first object to a proportional allusion (etymologically, that is to say, in the happy times of language, analogy means proportion).”
Barthes often takes analogy as the perfid member of the a pair whose other member is this ‘simple’ structural correspondence, homology. And yet, as we have seen with Geoffroy, the law of analogues begins, with a distortion (a reconceptualization of how up and down refers to a creature, with the basis of the vertical dimension being an internal organization that can only be seen for what it is once we turn the creature one hundred eighty degrees) and then produces homologies that give us a different systematic sense of biotic space.
This is at least the sense that Charles Fourier took from Geoffroy. Baudelaire of course drew from Fourier, but latter on, Barthes at least sipped at him, the way a hummingbird sips at the dew in a flower, and from him Barthes took away the idea that pleasure could be, however derisively, systematized – that is, it could be introduced into the empire of criticism. And perhaps there is a specter here of the specter Derrida investigates in Marx.
Rock Lobster...!
Fourier wrote of analogy as a calculus in Le nouveau monde industrial:
“It is necessary to prelude this demonstration by some details of analogy. Our beautiful souls in making such pathos out of the great book of nature, its eloquent voice and beauties, don’t know how to explain a single line of that great book. For us, it is only a desolate enigma without the calculus of analogy that decomposes all the mysteries, and very pleasantly too, for it unveils all the hypocries and snatches off the civilized mask, It is with good reason that Bernardin de St Pierre names them frivolous and thespian virtues.“
The calculus of analogies, it turns out, is a mélange of folklore, etymology, and allegory – and yet it teases the brain that is aware it has been thrust, indeed, into the new industrial world, one in which we live among structures that seem to be built all independently, and yet continually form a pattern. A pattern of European cities that was decrypted, of course, by Allied and German pilots in the 1940s, and thereafter by the planners who carried the target diagrams in their heads as they drew lines on paper that became the great highways along which vehicles could drive to transport goods, to bring the worker to work or the vacationer to the beach, and that could, ultimately, empty the city when the bombs or missiles dropped.
That calculus forms one parameter of the dream of a universal science made up of an eccentric traversal of the sciences, trolling for resemblences.
In the definitive, 1937 version of his “The Praying Mantis”, Roger Caillois (whose candidate for the universal science he later calls ‘diagonal science”) investigates the insect within the precincts of two different registers. One of them involves an investigation of the kinds of mantis, its form and its characteristics. In other words, this is an investigation in animal ethology. On the other hand, Caillois investigates how the mantis has figured in the belief systems of various cultures around the globe. This research is recognizably the kind of comparative anthropology that his teacher, Marcel Mauss, practiced. What makes this double register unusual is that Caillois is searching for what we would now call a sociobiological approach, or level. The fact that the praying mantis female eats the male, sometimes in the act of coitus, is an ethological fact that irradiates out in symbols and meanings in various cultures that can be observed and collected by the anthropologist. In Caillois’ version of this search, it is not just overt references to the mantis that he seeks, but all kinds of narratives concerning devouring women, succubi, Giftmadchen (women who are loaded with a poison and whose embraces poison their partner – an oddly persistent motif in the James Bond films), and other femmes fatales, with the point being that we have, here, not simply a coincidence, but a unity. The unity arises, here, as evidence of much the same sort of thing that Geoffroy supposed he was getting at by looking at the unity of the body plan of the lobster and the vertebrate – that is, it arises as part of the of greater biological unity of descent. This biological function survives in the instinctual level of human beings (Caillois, at this point, adheres to a colonial anthropology that ascribes to the ‘primitive’ some closer relation to the instincts, as though the culture of the tribe had not developed the techniques of sublimation that the ‘civilized man’ possesses. This is a derivative of what Johannes Fabian calls ‘allochrony’, in which different ages or times are attributed to synchronously co-existing societies). Here is a key passage from Caillois’ essay:
“The present study seems to carry the confirmation of fact to his [Bergson’s] theoretical views: the praying mantis presents itself like the sort of objective idogram materially realizing in the exterior world the most tendacious virtualities of affectivity. There is nothing to be astonished about: from the behavior of the insect to the consciousness of man, in this homogenous universe, the path is continous. The mantis devours its male during coitus, man imagines feminine creatures devouring him after attracting him into their arms. There is a difference from the act to the representation, but the same biological orientation organizes the parallelism and determines the convergence. [My translation, Caillois Oeuvres 2008, 203]
It is against this background, one in which Caillois’ essay and later work (which I want to examine in another post) fit into a certain cultural pattern that shifted the great sorting terms of nature and culture, that we should understood Barthes’ allergy to analogy. Here are the first two paragraphs of “The demon of analogy”, a fragment in Barthes book on himself:
Saussure’s bete noire was the arbitrary (nature of the sign). His [Barthes] is analogy. The analogical arts (cinema, photography), the analogical methods (academic criticism, for instance) are discredited. Why? Because analogy implies an affect of ‘nature’, it constitutes the ‘natural’ as the source of truth: and what also adds to the curse of analogy is that it is irrepressible (Re, 1637 II): as soon as a form is seen, it is necessary that it resembles something. Humanity seems condemned to the analogy, which is to say, in the end, to Nature. From whence we find the effort of painters, of writers to escape it. How? By two contrary excesses, or, if you prefer, two ironies, which puts Analogy in derision, be it in feigning a respect that is spectacularly flat (which is the copy that saves itself), be it in deforming regularly – that is, according to rules – the mimed object (which is anamorphosis, V, 44 II).
Outside of these transgressions, which are opposed benificiently to perfid Analogy, there is simple structural correspondence, homology, which reduces the reference of the first object to a proportional allusion (etymologically, that is to say, in the happy times of language, analogy means proportion).”
Barthes often takes analogy as the perfid member of the a pair whose other member is this ‘simple’ structural correspondence, homology. And yet, as we have seen with Geoffroy, the law of analogues begins, with a distortion (a reconceptualization of how up and down refers to a creature, with the basis of the vertical dimension being an internal organization that can only be seen for what it is once we turn the creature one hundred eighty degrees) and then produces homologies that give us a different systematic sense of biotic space.
This is at least the sense that Charles Fourier took from Geoffroy. Baudelaire of course drew from Fourier, but latter on, Barthes at least sipped at him, the way a hummingbird sips at the dew in a flower, and from him Barthes took away the idea that pleasure could be, however derisively, systematized – that is, it could be introduced into the empire of criticism. And perhaps there is a specter here of the specter Derrida investigates in Marx.
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