Epidemiology of a cliche

Hendrick Herzberg at the New Yorker had the cleverest idea. Why not apply the  Kubler Ross stages of grief to the Romney defeat? I don’t know why nobody else has ever thought of this. 

“… the House. The Republicans will have seven or eight fewer seats in that body, but hold it they did, and this fact is what those among them who are stuck at Stage 1 of Mme. Kübler-Ross’s five-stage topography of grief (“Denial”), and even a few who are tentatively assaying Stage 3 (“Bargaining”), are clinging to. (Talk radio is permanently tuned to Stage 2, “Anger,” and Stage 4, “Depression,” hangs heavy.) In the view of these Republicans, the election was a tie; and on the legitimacy of their most cherished goal—keeping rich folks’ taxes at their current historic lows…”

Meanwhile, Will Oremus at Slate had the cleverest idea ever to brighten that mag: why not apply the Kubler Ross stages of grief to the Fox News perception of the Romney defeat? I can’t believe nobody ever thought of this!

In Fox News' election coverage Tuesday night, there was little pretense of fairness or balance. What there was, from the start, was a glum tone that turned downright funereal by the time Mitt Romney finally conceded, near 1 a.m. To watch the network's anchors and guests work through the dawning realization that their candidate was doomed was to witness a textbook case of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian,Richard Adams and Tim McCarthy had the brilliant idea of comparing the conservative reaction to the Election to – Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief! I don’t know where these pundits get their ideas, but isn’t that just brilliant and unexpected? 

“On the Kübler-Ross model, Red State's Erick Erickson is still at stage one:

The odds were never with us historically. It has nothing to do with an embrace of one world view or rejection of another. It is just damn hard to beat an incumbent President who is raking in millions and laying a ground work for re-election while your side is fighting it out in a primary.That's like wandering around saying "I'm fine, honestly."

Meanwhile the RedState site itself seems to at stage two”

The NYT’ is unfortunately behind the curve this cycle in brilliantly and unexpectedly pairing  Kubler Ross and the election. Perhaps this is because Frank Rich, in 2008, was already using Kubler Ross to talk about the Republicans. Or perhaps it is because in the analysis of the 2010 defeat by the Democrats, political reporter Henry Alford compared the Democratic reaction to… Kubler Ross!

Then of course there is Jordan Bloom at the American Conservative, who analysed the GOP reaction  to their loss in terms of … Kubler-Ross! The Daily Kos thread which analyzed the GOP loss in terms of… Kubler-Ross! And the columnist for the Albany Union-Leader who analyzes the GOP loss in terms of… Kubler Ross!

This collection almost makes me think – almost! – that we have about done to death the comparison with Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief and elections. And having done it to death, are we going to grieve?

Perhaps. My grief will take the form of wondering if there is anything – burning the eggs, missing your bus – that can’t be subsumed into the Kubler-Ross grieving process. And whether that process with its supposed order cherrypicks reactions to create a pseudo-universal.

But I wouldn’t want to knock the sheer genius of the political analysis we have had during this election cycle. That would be anger and denial, and I won’t do that!

We are not post

I grew tired of living in the post – post whatever – age in the eighties. I suppose post-ness was inevitable. It was one of the great peculiarity of the imperialist mindset of the age of discovery and exploitation that time itself has been wrenched from the reality we all know – which is that we all live synchronically in the same time – to a time that reflects what we want to believe – that in th

e same moment x peoples are “modern” and y peoples are ‘primitive’, or in the “Stone Age”. The very idea that the ages have to do with hard materials – rather than, say, the age of knots, or the age of quincunxes - was part of the Man’s program. But the program got tired, hence the post-iness, as if we had been raptured from that history, even as we enjoyed its fruits to the last drop.
One of the posts we don’t live in is the post-phallogocentric age. This is something that comes through clearly when you have a baby, for one of the great games of babydom is to find who the baby resembles. Having a male baby – Adam – has made the game easier, for Adam is supposed to resemble me.
Myself, I don’t see it. I must admit, here, that I have an odd blindness concerning what I look like. When, for instance, I look at family albums, it always takes me a few seconds to put a name to the blonde haired, hunched teen that often forms part of the family group. Oh, me again! And I have lost complete contact with what I look like in the age of digital photographs. I put up photos of myself like any other digital narcissist on facebook, but they do slightly amaze me, because the person in those photos couldn’t be more alien to the person who is, supposedly, inhabiting the face, body and glasses that the photos portray. I have a certain, well, a-sthesia about my face and general aboutness.
But to come back to the point – it isn’t that Adam looks like me or A. that impresses me at the moment (A.’s relatives in America, in fact, think he looks “so French”), but how, at four weeks in his mission to planet earth, I can already see outcroppings of us, gestures and head turns and movements of the eyebrows. Gestures are the music of the body, and in Adam is met our two different melodies, while something – a vanishing point of genius – adds just a little turn to the mix, making all the difference. But there is only one gesture I wanted to write about here. Myself, I do not like being tucked in. Specifically, I do not like my feet being under a blanket. When we check into hotel rooms, I thoroughly and alarmingly deconstruct the bed sheets, which in hotels they have a tendency to fold rigidly under the mattress. They also have a tendency to pile on sheets, which adds to my discomfort. My feet are being strangled! I, absurdly, want to scream. I have noticed that Adam has the same disinclination to the whole totally swaddled thing. Perhaps every infant is the same, but still, I get a little possessive pride when I see my boy kick out of what we are wrapping him in - his Magic Wrap swaddling clothes, or his blankie – even if I know that this won’t do, and wrap him up again. Am I projecting? Or simply watching an impulse, a recklessness, that found its way through me, and is finding its way through Adam, and so on down the generations?

In my suit of irony

“As through this world I travel/ I see lots of funny men”… Truer words never came out of Woody Guthrie’s mouth. As through this world I travel, I also reflect on the funny man I have become. Especially now, as I am the privileged witness – a dad! – to the baby days of another funny man, our Adam. However, as I sit here, filled with a porridge like warmth of love, as another day struggles to drop a little light in the morning streets of Paris,  I also worry a bit that I am going to lose my edge, my attitude, my peculiar funniness. As proof, I can look behind me at the veritable pile of cuteness that has accumulated in the room that Adam will eventually be sleeping in. There’s the cute pyjamas with the cute print of bears and giraffes, there’s the cute dolls (among which I should mention a large donkey given to us by our friend Sylvie, which has won my heart, if not Adam’s – I do love donkeys), and I think to myself: am I losing my mind? For cuteness was the one thing that I have always feared, the one thing impervious to edge. Cuteness reverses the terms of irony. It disarms distance. To take an ironic attitude to nouveau-ne pjs is to make irony ridiculous. Which is a problem if, like me, you’ve pledged your soul to irony. That pledge goes back all the way to when I first heard of irony, which must have been in the sixth grade or so. In the Suburban South, you have to surrender your soul to something when you reach adolescence. Either you have to be washed in the blood of the lamb, or you have to figure out how not to be.

My choice was irony. Lesser lights (family, friends, teachers) mistakenly called it sarcasm (and my brother Dan improved upon that word by calling it sour-casm, perhaps the best portmanteau word I’ve ever encountered).  Myself, I called it irony, and I loved the very word. I loved the way “iron” is in it. Because of course iron is in stainless steel, and irony, too, has something stainless about it. Once you put on the armor of irony, you can go anywhere, through any flood – for instance, a flood of blood gushing from the Lamb of God – and come through unflecked. What’s not to like about that?

However, it was not only the savior who lurked around the corners of Clarkston, Georgia, waiting to leap out at you – equally powerful was the “cute” and the “darling”. What the passions were to 17^th century French moralists, the cute and the darling were to the suburban families of Atlanta – the fundamental grammar on which all style was grounded. This, actually, misstates the entire power of those words – it was not just a question of taste, but a whole orientation of the lifestyle. Once something was ‘cute’, it was lifted beyond aesthetics. It was headed towards being “too cute”. This meant, oddly enough, that it was just cute enough. At one point, apparently, in the noir 40s, too cute was a sort of putdown – that is how it appears in Raymond Chandler novels, where the not so latent homoerotic panic motivates both the private dick and his antagonists, the male buddy police detectives. But too cute lost the pejorative meaning about the time the GI bill came into effect.

All cuteness, in effect, emanates from the baby, perhaps because, holding your own baby, you become a conduit for such an overwhelming rush of emotion that you need to thin it out or it will short circuit your emotional wiring.  One thing is for sure:  you can’t sit there in your suit of irony, thinking you are sub species aeternitatis about the whole thing. At the moment, I have to confess, I find Adam’s pajamas ‘too cute for words.”

My hope is that we will grow out of this phase. I know at least Adam will. I’m having doubts about myself.

rivers and Adam

Sometimes, after Adam is full to the brim with milk and formula, I sweep him back to me and let him lounge on my chest, his feet hanging off one side of me, his head cradled in the crook of my arm on the other side, and I let him sigh, nestle, burb and burble there. At these times, I think of Adam as a little Huck Finn on his raft. It is a strained association, and yet, to me, an irresistible one. Perhaps it is that he is so small against me, perhaps it is that he is so contented – the analogy to Huck, being pulled by a gigantic force beyond his reckoning, while looking up after his stew at a night sky full of riddles and of vast extent,  at the still point in his flight from his father to territories unknown, conversing with Jim – well, the analogy makes sense to me, and it is why I jump from this image I have so clearly in my mind to  Adam, here, pulled in his own way by gigantic forces, too, the irresistible growth of the body that flows, too, forward, carrying brain, limb, heart, as relentless as a river heading South. And as vulnerable to the blows of life as any boy on a raft in the midst of a mile wide river. I see Adam’s tininess and how he is incredibly bereft of any way of coping with the world of adults, and that he it doesn’t concern him. He still trustingly sprawls across me, making those sucking motions with his mouth between yawns and shutting his eyes (and me on the lookout for the one sure sign of impending sleep, the balled up fists) – this sense of him in the play of giant forces of course floods me with a mixed sense of anxiety (knowing that my fuckups from now on out won’t just weigh primarily on me) and gratitude (to be entrusted with such utter vulnerability somehow must mean, or so my deluded feelings say, that I am  a trustable person).

Of course, Adam has never seen a river, never set eyes on the stars at night or the moon. He hasn’t perhaps even properly seen me or A, as his eyes are not yet operating at that level. Even if he could see, with Paris’ sullen weather and these chill evenings, he isn’t going outside to gaze at the cosmos. Myself, it wasn’t until I was a boy – seven or eight – that I really started dreaming of rivers. The nightly bath was the Amazon. The stream in the woods near our house was the Mississippi. However, I was a suburban Atlanta kid, and never ever imagined the Seine – which will, to my everlasting astonishment, be Adam’s first river. His second will be the Chattahoochee… just so he doesn’t get the idea that a river is always such a civilized thing, so easily spanned by old bridges, so tame, but a thing that is still of the New World, can flood, can carry uprooted trees and flooded houses down with it, and will not be taken for granted by God, babe, or the Corps of Engineers.  

on taste

Gracian’s first book to acquire a European reputation was The Hero. It was translated into English in the seventeenth century, and into French in the early 18^th century by a translator who remarked on Gracian’s resemblance to La Bruyere. A book with such a title, one might expect, is an essay on heroes that one finds in history or literature. But this isn’t so – the book is in a sense a how to book about how to become a hero, or great man. Gracian worked in the field of worldly wisdom – his distant heirs now retail banalities about “leadership science”. The heirs are writing for an audience of essentially uneducated businessmen, and are often as lacking in education themselves, and make up for this last point by being ardent collectors of the inspirational sayings of the famous. Context, of course, isn’t the point – leadership disdains context, which is full of obstacles and other people’s objections, and marches proudly into war, or a higher ROI, with the conviction that the long term will simply be taken up with collecting various sayings of the leadership that did it, to inspire others, and will pay no attention to the blood and guts on the field, the fired help, the long term disasters born out of intoxicating short term gains.

Leadership, in other words, is a royal screwing.

But we can’t blame Gracian for this sad state of affairs, since he was evidently intent on giving advice on how to become a universal man (suitably Catholicized). One of the properties of the hero that Gracian promoted was what his English 17^th century translator called “gusto” – evidently, taste had not yet grown out of its vulgar accountrements of tongue and appetite at this point:

“EVery great capacitie is ever hard to be pleased: The Gusto must as well be improv'd as the wit. Both rais'd and improv'd are like Twinns begotten by capacity and coheirs of excellency: Ne|ver sublime wit yet bred a flat or abject Gusto. There are perfections like the sun, others like light. The Eagle makes love to the sun. The poor frozen fly destroyes her self in the flames of a Candle. The height of a Capacity is best taken by the elevation of a Gusto.”

Gracian’s Gusto operates though the logic of praise and dispraise. The taste of the hero is perfect in as much as its praise and its scorn are appropriate to the object – and there’s the rub. There’s a crooked line under the skin of the culture that leads from Gusto to fandom, or from the universal man to the fan. The world of like and dislike – our ultimate buttons – have simplified and rationalized Gusto until it works for anything. Until, I think, it gets in front of everything.

For years, I was a book reviewer. I am not exaggerating when I say I’ve reviewed more than 500 books – mostly in small reviews for Publishers Weekly, but in bigger reviews for various newspapers and mags. And in the course of reviewing, I began to seriously hate like and dislike. It seemed to me that my like and dislike were not really at stake in reviewing a book. True, it was hard to give a “good” review to a book I disliked, and vice versa. Still, I tried to make my reviews struggles with what the books were doing. I tried to make them diagnostic, exploratory, a way of getting a good surgeon’s grasp on the innards of the book. This, I must say, didn’t go down well with editors, who would often send me emails commenting, what did you think of the book? Meaning, did you like it? And usually I had to throw in a few words of praise or dispraise. Mostly, though, I tried to so subordinate the like the like or dislike moment in the review to the more interesting business of, well, thinking of the book, thinking about it, thinking with it, thinking through it.    

traps

There’s an essay by Louis Marin, the French critic, which begins with him discovering a 16th century Venetian book with the marvelous title, Of traps, of their composition and use, which, in the fashion of the humanist epoch, took the metaphorical sense of trap as an argument to organize an investigation not only of those devises by which we catch mice and rabbits, among other varmints, but also by which we catch men, in courtrooms and in power plays, in art and in the street. 
However, I don’t think this book included the first and greatest of all traps: clothing. Just as we don’t really see ourselves as apes, which are an animal whose habitat is behind bars, or in front of a National Geographic film crew, contentedly shrieking and scratching their hairy hides, we don’t see our clothing as a way of trapping our ape’s bodies. Surely, however, they are. When I unbutton Adam to change him (showing a delight in the fact, if it happens, that this time, there is caca, that I would not have believed in myself a year ago – one so fears the mysteries of infant digestion!) and then diaper him up again and encase him in a thin undergarment, and then in his usual pjs, I notice, and he notices, that each snap is the closure of a trap – first his little legs, then the arms, then snap snap snap the stomach and chest. Depending on whether Saturn is in Virgo, or he’s hungry, or he’s not hungry, or he’s bothered by the light, he will kick against this indignity, the way a dog will try to escape from the grasp of a child determined to dress it up in human clothes. If the child is seen by an adult, he or she is scolded – dogs don’t wear clothes! But we, of course, do.
Snap snap. From the adult perspective, the trappiness of infant clothing really comes out in those pjs, which are all too common, which require snapping in the back. Sometimes these are the cutest clothes, but they require that you turn your child around, and this is not welcomed by any infant. So you pick him up, and you wrestle with the snaps as the protests get louder and the neighbors begin to wonder about your parenting skills. Oh well, let them. In fact, fuck them. And you briefly rehearse all the noxious noises that they have produced over time. This is displacing your frustration in a classically neurotic manner, yes, but you don’t care. 
Finally, though, I have all the snaps that I can reach snapped, and my little lapin is trapped, and sometimes we both have to acknowledge that that was, in a way, fun – fun the way a roller coaster is fun. The tears, the screams, the snaps are forgotten, and we are ready once again to live like human beings – the animal that traps itself.

the user illusion

When I stick the biberon in poor Adam’s mouth, quieting his protests (at having to face another day scanning this strange planet, perhaps) and getting him into the rhythm of sucking down formula (yes, Le Leche league – we are incorrigible half and halfers. Wanna make something of it?), I have a long time – or at least a couple hundred gulps of time – to study his face.

It is interesting how many people like to tell you that the expressions mean nothing – just a galvanic movement, a tropism. While we all recognize the cry and even grant it some symbolic status – cry equals pain – the smile, or the laugh, are definitely secondary properties, or so the common wisdom goes. Pain is fundamental, humor – which requires a minimal capacity to compare and contrast – is second stage, and if you live long enough, it will be jettisoned and there you’ll be, back to crying and peeing in your bed in some old folks home. Yes, we orbit around pain, our black sun, and smile first as a trick of synaptic firings, and then as a control mechanism that mediates pain.

I’m reminded of the “user illusion” that the computer designers talk about. We sit down and look at the screen and see files and docs, and we think of files as being cardboard, and docs as being paper, and writing as being the application of an instrument to a surface. But this surface appearance is a delusion – it is algorithms all the way down, schmuck. Similarly, we glance about us, we are bright, we are alert, we think we get things, but the bytes of info we deal with are a pitiful remnant, an insanely edited fragment, of the bytes that bombard us. We not only can’t bear too much reality – try as we will, we will never even be able to see it.

And so yes, I too go along with the common wisdom here. I project. My subconscious gets an A in “existing as Roger”, while my consciousness gets, at most, a D+.

But I have to ponder the illusion, too. Last night, Adam was just barely asleep, and I had turned away to read, when he made a sound that made me turn back to him. He was, apparently, laughing in his sleep. Or simulating laughter.

This made me laugh. My laugh is real – his is not. But…

In a famous essay, Can a horse laugh, Robert Musil reports on seeing a horse laugh when it was tickled – although he says that this was ‘before the war’, and maybe since the war horses have ceased to laugh. Musil describes how he watched a groom with a curry comb make a horse laugh by tickling it on its sensitive spot, its shoulder blades. The horse acted “exactly like a peasant girl” who you would try to tickle – this was, remember, the ancien regime, which still existed pre-1914 – by moving out of the way and swatting with his muzzle at the comb. When that didn’t work:

“But the boy took the advantage. And when his curry comb got near the shoulder, the horse couldn’t stand it anymore. It turned around on its legs, its whole body shook, and it pulled its lips back from its teeth, as far as it could. For a second, it behaved exaclty like a person who has been  tickled so much that he can’t laugh anymore. The learned skeptic will object that it couldn’t have laughed in the first place. I’d respond to him that this is correct insofar as the groom was the one of the two who neighed the most from laughter every time. This does seem in fact to be a unique hjuman capacity, that is, to be able to neigh from laughter.”

And I haven’t even gotten to how Adam balls up his little fists when he sleeps and melts my heart.

Bringing up baby

Already I am dealing with it, the tug between convenience and integrity, between Satan and taking up, in a manner of speaking, your cross. Yesterday, we finally concluded that, evidently, Adam had grown beyond being palliated by a finger. When he wanted to suck, he no longer could be palmed off with a cuticled succadeneum. So I came up with the idea of a sucette - pacifier, which on the best child

rearing authority (i.e, The Simpsons) has a tonic and calming effect on the wee one. Thus, I sortied out in the dusk last night, and visited several pharmacies until I found one for the 0-3 months set, as the package helpfully advised. Coming back, I was eager to plug it into Adam’s mouth, figuring child rearing would now be a snap, what with the enormous docility that would flow from the thing.

The thing. Indeed, in the plain light of day, a pacifier is a rather disgusting thing. A pulpy plastic nipple that looks as appetizing as wet newspaper, attached to a band of plastic shaped in the form of mouth, except bigger, with a plastic ring – reminiscent of the ring in the snout of a pig – attached to the other side, so I suppose you can unplug the child. In my haste to apply the patented Simpsons treatment, I didn’t notice that the entire mechanism depends on the baby’s will. If the baby doesn’t apply the inward sucking, the pacifier will, evidently, fall out of its mouth. I was thinking more in terms of the cork on a wine bottle, but applying the thing, I saw that my vague image of how this thing would work forgot the perfect lack of will characteristic of most wine bottles (at least until after the fifth glass, at which point the bottle will start to blur itself and budge itself just out of reach of your hand).

Adam, sensible baby, tentatively took the plastic nipple in his mouth, sloshed it about a bit on his tongue, and discovered that plastic tastes much like Mitt Romney’s breath after one of his talks to his fund raisers – a stale mixture of commerce and chemicals rendering the whole inedible and unfit for buccal manipulation.

Watching him scrunch up his face and reject the pacifier, I was, a., proud of my boy for rejecting the entire Dow chemical fiasco that has acidified the ocean and is destroying the atmosphere, and b., disappointed that there was, after all, no pablum for the harried parent.

I imagine that I will apply the pacifier again. Infants and the children they grow into are eventually ground down by parental insistence when it comes to the artificial ingredients of life. Besides, too much rejecting of plastic by Adam will worry me – I have a fear of him growing into one of those seventeen year olds with the whispy goatee, the hemp clothes, and the bongo drum, such as roam around Austin in the summer and camp at Barton Springs. But … well, fuck me and my tastes. In any case, the pacifier was a bit of a lesson.

sympathy for Marcel's Pa

Sympathy for Marcel’s father

We know the story, which is the story of why the story always shatters, never self-organizes, never closes on itself, never is the story. Marcel, an anxious child, can only truly calm his pacing heart and asthmatic and insomniac spasms by being kissed by Mama before bedtime. Of course, the real milk and honey would be Mama spending the whole night on a cot besides him as he sleeps. But the fly in the milk and honey is Papa, who operates as a ‘suppressor’, or so the Scientologists say (knowledge I have garnered from the tres disappointing sketch of Tom Cruise in last month’s Vanity Fair), and frowns at the codlings. Last night, advocating for the wee little pea to remain on his little foam wee little pea ship, instead of being borne by A. as we watched the first episode of Homeland that we had just downloaded, I had a flash of sympathy for Marcel’s pa. Surely he was thinking that Marcel would be much better off if he didn’t get milk and honey every time. And maybe Marcel would have toughened up – maybe, if his father had prevailed, he would have grown up to introduce the noir detective into France, writing sentences like: ‘And then I hit him with the butt end of the pistol. He seemed to want to protest, but with the scarf stuffed in his mouth, his words weren’t too clear to me.” --- instead of, well, choose your own favorite oceanic outpouring.

So it goes. Us father’s mean well.

King Test

When I was in elementary school, I liked tests. There I was, a little ace, with my little Guiness Book of Records, my Funk n Wagnels Encyclopedia, the entertaining smart boy on the street. In High School, I stopped liking tests – partly cause I no longer aced them. In fact, I sank to the norm or below. And perhaps because I was no longer so good at them, I took a more level view of them. The longer I looked, the more it seemed to me that tests had to be on their way out in the age of nuclear power and space flight. They were so primitive. They were as bad an instrument for measuring learning as a spoon is for eating spaghetti. What you learned, what you know, is imbricated with what others know –it is social to the very core. And yet, the test was individuated and individuating from the get go. The only people who really understood this fact about learning, it seemed to me, were the cheaters – who, at least, exchanged answers with each other. But of course cheating is ultimately parasitic upon testing. No, I felt, tests had to go.

Later on I began to think that the problem was that tests had been displaced from the plane of experience to the plane of cognition. In experience, the test is essential. The self must be put, or must put itself, in a thousand alien circumstances in order to know itself – in order to unfold itself. Ultimately, the self has a plastic, flexible capability, an imaginative potential, that comes out when it is really tested. Unfortunately, the rule of cognitive tests has made it harder and harder to afford experiential ones. In the richest society in history, the U.S., it is now imperative to cut short the Wanderjahre and find a job with insurance, so that you can pay back the student loan. Life has been visibly diminished.

In France, which is as exam-ocentric as ancient China, the test form is everywhere – especially in childrearing. Our little nouveau-ne, Adam, had to pass his numbers – on weight – before we could leave the hospital, and the sage femme that visits us has said rather menacing things whenever we told her that Adam didn’t seem to be eating as much as he should. Poor tyke is a finicky eater, like his Pa. So yesterday, when Antonia took him to the clinic and it turned out that he had been secretly gaining weight – indeed, he passed the weight test 30 grams to spare!- we wept with joy. At the same time, it felt like already we are  tracking him on the path that leads to the “bac” – and he hasn’t even gotten the visual apparatus in order, yet! Meanwhile, from the States, all I hear is parents complaining that their kids are underperforming the tests, which means that they won’t make the grade for the scholarships, which means that they will have to go to community college and then be stuck in some hamburger-flipping job at Mickey Dees the rest of their life.

The test regime is now a brainless monster, with tentacles in every heart. Yet, surely Rousseau was right in Emile – good childrearing is about using your hands, imagining, dawdling over the immediate data of nature (if you can find it).

two childrearing books

As every alert parent knows, there are two essential child rearing books – Doctor Spock, in the most revised edition, and Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du Sens. Jonie Mitchell’s lines come to mind: “papa gave me the sugar/ momma showed me the deeper meaning.” Such is the case here. We use Spock to gain ersatz certainty in response to various problems that pop up in the schedule of duties (eat sleep poop radiate an adorable aura that touches every heavenly orb) that have been impose on baby – and we use Deleuze to understand why, after a lifetime of ironies and distancing techniques, we find ourselves spontaneously cooing chou chou and petit lapin to our bundle of joy. It is a world of diminutives, a real microverse, and we are just realizing the extent of our contract with Wonderland – which is where the L.d.S comes in to describe its extent and limits.The Logique was presided over by the spirit of Lewis Carroll, while Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is governed by the harsher spirit of Artaud. Lewis Carroll gives us the sugar, Deleuze notes, while Artaud gives us the deeper meaning. In his asylum in Rodez, Artaud tried to translate Jabberwocky – and in that moment emerged something that was less a crossroads than a car crash. For though Carroll’s made up language and Artaud’s schizo talk, which had infected his poems since the breakdown of 1938, might seem similar, in fact they repulsed each other.

Artaud intensely disliked Jabberwocky. Deleuze explains why – and in so doing the Deleuze reader gets a sense of the fact that  the malentendu between Artaud and Carroll stnds at the center of Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze quotes Artaud’s letter about Jabberwocky, which for me, now, defines the difference between parenthood and the perpetual bachelorhood of philosophy:

“I don’t like either the languages of the surface, exuding happy leisure time and intellectual successes; the former rests on the anus, but without putting in the soul or the heart. The anus is always terror.”

The anus in the microverse of the diminutives is less terror than clockwork, a mechanism for measuring the new born’s absorption of milk, as well as a mess you clean up without really thinking too much about it after a while. You don’t change diapers in fear and trembling.

Myself, I’ve long been on the fear and trembling side, and now I’m on the other. It is a relief to change diapers for once. And it makes the petit lapin happy, too!

identification and self interest

Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy. “The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a. But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond space and time.” (GW VI 28)

Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains” without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense, Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.

As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a process of projection, and thus is the first to use  “identification” in the psychological sense that became part of the ordinary language of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the

position of him who suffers – a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man,

developed but weak in Civilized man – what would this idea matter to the truth

of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the

more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with

the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been

infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning.”

The issue of personal identity travels to France by way of Locke’s translators and readers – such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an identifying self is a definite marker, an intersigne on the way to understanding character under capitalism. That is, to understanding how character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate semantic segments to occupy a certain space of symbols and capacities in those societies that we name by using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition – modern – as if the modern had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new framework altogether. Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian principles of property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification that, as Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense, impossible. Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it working its way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the seemingly esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis.  Just as selfishness can become an acid that so dissolves the self that one is left with an absolute Berkeleyian idealism, personal identity inevitably begins to pose the problem of the maker of persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics of modernity, operating under the unconscious conviction that they live in the modern, face this bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place those schemas of identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though the pre-modern was some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather than the product of the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as something generated within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow and double, an emergent and undeniable force in the matrix. 

Suckers unite!

It occurred to me in the hour before cock crow – which in the 12^th arrondissement is around 4 a.m. – that the whole corrupt train of our present social arrangements can be summed up by the value placed on “suck” – viz., this sucks, he you or they suck, it sucks. As we all know, this means that “it” is a disaster, he she or it is a cretin, and that low quality is the name of this game, if you want to play it. But, as Adam placidly – or, sometimes, fiercely – sucked on my little finger, giving us a respite from his desire to try out his new lungs (in top shape! And what volume for a seven pound five ounce boy!), I realize that this is all wrong, backwards, and senseless. It sucks should me, it is heaven. Real communism, utopia, the singularity and nirvana can all be summed up by, it sucks. We long, we little monkeys, not for nothingness, but for the attaching interface of lips and tongue, ahold of something. And yet – sucking is not eating or breathing,  it is not processing something. Amateurs think that sucking has a physiological use  wholly satisfied by breastfeeding, but an hour or two or three with a newborn will show these folks the error of their ways – sucking is needed for breastfeeding, but it is desired in itself, and continues after breastfeeding palls. Sucking is pure superfluity, pure luxury, pure excess. It is beyond something, and it disdains nothing.

Of course, any sophisticated 12 year old can tell you it sucks alludes to something genital and nasty. However, like many of the malformed views of 12 year olds (cool is cool! you are either in the in crowd or you are nobody!), this isn’t really sophisticated at all. Alas, the views of sophisticated 12 year olds rock and rule our world, become our norms, and lead, as I said above,paragraph one, sentence one, I believe, to the catastrophic decline of our society. What the 12 year old is in flight from is the surge, the primitive surge of sucking in which we are all one, a common humanity of suckers. Having gone through housetraining, school and hierarchy, the fact that we come from sucking seems too dreamlike, too nightmarish a truth. And yet there it is. We come from sucking. We all share sucking.

And this lead me – perhaps unwisely, since I have spent much of the last 48 hours catching very little sleep in a chair designed by the Marquis de Sade in a hospital room – to my revelation. The society I want to fight for exists in the shadow of the slogan: I suck, and I want to suck even more! Or, to expand beyond the trivially egotistic: it sucks, and I have never heard a more glorious truth! Only a solidarity among suckers will change the momentum of our decline. I am of the sucker’s party, and proud of it!