Engels and song culture: you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows .

The recent incomprehension event - the puzzlement of some commenters that the Nobel prize could go to a songwriter, and the equally flatheaded defense of Dylan as a poet - made me want to dig up old posts I wrote about song culture. A culture that has been significantly underrated or ignored in the cultural history of modernism. In particular, there is this bit from Engels that I liked... but here's the post I wrote in 2008.

From the perspective of the nineteenth century worker, there is something mocking, something a little satanic about freedom, as it was presented in the establishment discourse. Freedom, of course, comes with contracts – but what contracts! On the one side, the employer was in the position of seemingly having no limit to the things he could require of the laborer. On the other side, the laborer was blamed for not adhering to every tittle and jot of the employer’s dictate. From the perspective of the intellectual, society was making a Faustian pact with technology and industry. From the perspective of the worker, it wasn’t Faustian at all, but reeked of sulfur in the old, old way: the devil required infinite pain in this life, on penalty of losing life altogether without him. In the Position of the Working Class, Engels indicts the order of life required of the laborer in the factory by giving examples of the rules he or she had to follow, under threat of fine or dismissal: 

“What a time the worker has of it, too, inside the factory! Here the employer is absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes and adds to his codex at pleasure, and even, if he inserts the craziest stuff, the courts say to the working-man:
"You were your own master, no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by it."
And so the working-man only gets into the bargain the mockery of the Justice of the Peace who is a bourgeois himself, and of the law which is made by the bourgeoisie. Such decisions have been given often enough. In October, 1844, the operatives of Kennedy’s mill, in Manchester, struck. Kennedy prosecuted them on the strength of a regulation placarded in the mill, that at no time more than two operatives in one room may quit work at once. And the court decided in his favour, giving the working-men the explanation cited above. And such rules as these usually are! For instance: 1. The doors are closed ten minutes after work begins, and thereafter no one is admitted until the breakfast hour; whoever is absent during this time forfeits 3d. per loom. 2. Every power-loom weaver detected absenting himself at another time, while the machinery is in motion, forfeits for each hour and each loom, 3d. Every person who leaves the room during working- hours, without obtaining permission from the overlooker, forfeits 3d. 5. Weavers who fail to supply themselves with scissors forfeit, per day, 1d. 4. All broken shuttles, brushes, oil-cans, wheels, window-panes, etc., must be paid for by the weaver. 5. No weaver to stop work without giving a week’s notice. The manufacturer may dismiss any employee without notice for bad work or improper behaviour. 6. Every operative detected speaking to another, singing or whistling, will be fined 6d.; for leaving his place during working-hours, 6d.”

The notion that the owner has complete freedom to put anything in a contract he feels like putting in – that in fact, this is the alpha and omega of freedom, the unmediated power relationship between owner and worker - is still a powerful one in the U.S. Some states, notably Texas, have a fire at will clause that allows abusive leeway to the owners which is close to that allowed to the owners of serfs. As Engels notes about the lives of the working class – “these laborers are condemned, from their ninth year until their death, to live under the mental and corporal rod, they are more utterly slaves than Blacks in America, because they are more closely supervised – and then it is demanded, that they live like human beings, think like human beings, and feel like human beings!” 

I am fascinated, myself, by the prohibition on singing – which I want to get back to, as I am interested in tracing a history of alienation in the evanescent fabric of song culture. One should point out that the Manchester factories represented, at the time, a classical liberal ideal – elsewhere, for instance in the U.S., custom weighed on the extent to which you could limit freedom on the laborer’s side by contract. Jack Beatty’s excellent but, for some reason, little noticed book on the Gilded Age last year, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, is all about the triumph of the libertarian freedom of the owner, at the expense of the worker. 

Beatty’s chapter of the Homestead strike is well worth reading for those who want to understand how slowly the attitude took hold that one’s place of work was not at all one’s own – that ownership was strictly limited by the contract one freely signed, thus conveniently carving out a domain of serfdom in the free society. This serfdom has now, of course, been so assimilated that we naturally segregate our work space from other spaces, and in fact obey the rules that now organize any public space – so much for the existential dimension of freedom. The contract still has this marvelous, magical property, operating to emancipate the contractor and enslave the contractee. There’s an interview with Beatty at the Atlantic site about the book. Beatty points to a turning point after the Civil War in which the Republican party converged with the business elite and turned its back on the ideal of ‘free labor’, in essence betraying its very reason for being:

“Even when Lincoln was advocating free labor, it was a nostalgic idea. As early as 1866, 60 percent of people worked for other people. Now, it’s 90-something percent. Then, of course, they worked in small units; it wasn’t the full-blown factory. But sure, Lincoln’s vision was at variance with the imperatives of the economy and with the necessities of the industrializing elites who came to power after the war. And then there was the railroad—and that changed everything….
…
Still, the free-labor ideal survives in farming as propaganda. Preserving the tiny number of "family farms" is a justification put forward by the farm lobby. The Homestead Act was put forth by the Republicans as a supposed cure for the class structure congealed by industrialism. The idea was that the eastern factory laborer would leave the factory behind for free land in the west. But that’s not the way it worked out. Why? Because the land was not free—$1,500 was the minimum needed to set up a farm as early as the 1840s. And that was three years pay for the skilled factory worker of 1900! Small farms weren't economically viable. So it wasn’t the factory laborer who went to the farm, but the factory itself. Women’s labor, child labor, seasonal labor—all the aspects of wage labor that the farm was supposed to cure became a part of farm life. That was a bitter social turn. There was no escape from industrial capitalism.”

Legends have grown up around the Homestead strike. John Commons, in 1918, wrote: 

“In the Homestead strike, the labor movement faced for the first time a really modern manufacturing corporation with its practically boundless resources of war. The Amalgamated Association of Iran and Steel Workers in 1891 … was the strongest trade union in the entire history of the American labour movement.”

In 1892, the Carnegie Corporation, under the management of a well known opponent of Unions, H.C. Frick, decided to take on the Amalgamated Association by proposing a lowering of the wage for skilled labor in the steel mills and a new date for renewing contracts, January 1. The latter would make any future refusal of contract fall in the winter, when it would be harder to strike. The Union refused the terms – Frick sent a contingent of 300 Pinkerton men guarding a number of strikebreakers on barges down the Monongahela River. In response, the union barricaded the factory. Somebody fired a shot. A pitched battled ensued, in which the Pinkertons raked the crowd with rifle fire. Seven men died, but then the crowd returned fire until the Pinkertons had to go below deck. Certain of the guards lost heart, and the Pinkertons finally surrendered and were marched through a crowd that mauled them, and then sent back to Pittsburgh. Using the violence as an excuse and, of course, recognizing unlimited freedom of property only on the side of Carnegie, the state government sent in the militia, and to the Carnegie company sent in more Pinkertons. The strikebreakers gained access to the mills, and though the strike lasted until October, the power of the Union was broken. 

This is what Carnegie’s latest biographer, David Nasaw, said, in 2006, in an interview with a Pittsburgh paper:

Q: Now that the mills are gone, do you think Carnegie has a lasting local influence other than the libraries and museums?

A: I did not get into a cab or have a conversation at a hotel when I didn't get a response -- a lively response -- after telling people why I was in town. Everybody had a story about Carnegie, and very few stories put him in a good light. He moved to New York in the 1870s and died in 1919. But his presence still seems to haunt the city.
Is that because of the famous 1892 Homestead Strike? Carnegie blamed that on his business partner, H.C. Frick.

Well, reading the local papers on microfilm, I discovered that while the rest of the world might have been surprised by Homestead, Pittsburghers weren't. This wasn't the first time he'd brought in the Pinkertons -- he'd done the same damn thing at [Braddock's] Edgar Thomson works. Homestead followed a script he'd already written.
Still, Carnegie had written articles about respecting the working man. And previously, he'd been way out in front negotiating with unions. So workers weren't just angry when he brought in the Pinkertons: They felt betrayed.”

Beatty’s account of the strike draws upon the sociological study of the Pittsburgh area financed by the Russell Sage foundation in 1912. One of the sociologists, Margaret Frances Byington (about whom there is an astonishing paucity of information) wrote the book about Homestead. I’m going to quote from her in the next post.

That paper based ideology. On the thesis: Songs aren't poems or music.

It is interesting to me that so many writers who hate Dylan winning are talking about paper. The whole dispute about songs and poetry comes down, really, to the material substrate. But the idea that a song lyric written down doesn't work as poetry surely works two ways. I've heard a fair number of writers read their works, and rarely - in my experience, never - do the words work coming out of their mouths. Joyce who wanted in some ways to be a singer is great partly because the words work outside the paper. A song isn't a poem. The difference of the substrate is a real difference. You can sing certain poems, but in the singing, they become songs. That is only confusing if you ... well, if you have never read Grammatology, I'm tempted to say. Or if you have an idea that literature is defined by its material substrate. Now of course those writers who are so ardent about the paper test will protest that no, reading is somehow deeper, by which is meant that the paper substrate interfaces with the non-material mind substrate. Humanism is, when all is said and done, white magic. Myself, I think that this is bad metaphysics and a misunderstanding of the possibilities of literature. The art song has been around a long time: Brecht learned if from Karl Valentin in Munich cabarets. In France, it was Berenger under Louis Philippe - who Baudelaire hated - who mixed politics and song. Baudelaire, incidentally, is a key figure here, both pro and contra the fetish of paper.

 I sorta like the way Dylan's voice paved the way for the do it yourself era of voice. Again, though, this is nothing new - the popular song in 1830s France, or the voices in the Threepenny opera, were that same kinda raucous. Ca ira I guess is the mother of the raw song. I think that the distinction of song as a type of thing that is not poetry and not music is probably rooted in the raw voiced song. I wonder what Robert Burns sounded like? He was a great supporter of chopping the heads off kings. Was there a connection between the Jacobin sympathies (that his victorian fans bowdlerized) and the rawness of the sound he must have heard - since French revolutionary songs definitely penetrated the British isles? This interests me professionally, as a writer. I read the chapters of my novel to Antonia, or she reads them to me, because I am really interested in the sound, the sounds. I'm after sounds that I have heard in the street, in bars and restaurants and offices. Many of them I can write down, but I can't do myself. They won't come out of my mouth. This is the undervalued part of writing prose. The idea that you can simply read your stuff seems to point to this neglect rather than otherwise. Really you would have to bring a troupe with you. 

Congrats Bob! Dylan's Dunciad

I am going to succumb to my temptation to make a lit crit point. Although I don't think Bob Dylan was reading Alexander Pope during what I consider to be his richest period - 1964-1968 - he was producing what I think of as an American dunciad. Instead of Fleet street, the mockery was aimed at the circle that was located between Andy Warhol's The Factory and Greenwich village. Alexander Pope was a master at catching a certain English conversational tone - something nosepent, with its fraudulent assumption of cultural supremecy - and collaging it into the most classical of English meters. He even makes it an object of one of his great lines, from Essay on Criticism: “A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.” Dylan of course exists in a different environment, one that mixed the inheritors of the romantics - with their creed that all arts ideally merge in music - with the reality of pop and advertising, where all language becomes a caption to sell a product. When in Like a rolling stone the princess on the steeple says, finally, to the "mystery tramp" - do you want to make a deal. These songs are, on the surface, close to Warhol's product pieces - Brillo pads or Campbell soup - but they are supercharged with affect, instead of being cool and .affectless. It is just hard to make out what the affect is about - unlike Pope, Dylan doesn't have any vision of a classical order. He does, or at least Greil says he does, have a vision of a weird order - the order he finds all over the American songbook. The weird order transmutes all deals into moments of dread, I suppose you could say, since what is dealt comes down to who you are. The art of the deal eats the dealer. Or, as Hugh Kenner puts it in the counterfeiters, writing about Pope's rewriting the Dunciad as if a dunce had written it: "“’The Mighty Mother, and her Son who brings
The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings
I sing’
The bard stumbles into his kettledrums and falls headlong. A hideous cacaphony (brings – Kings – sings); a failure to assess the compatability of end-stopped lines with a system based on caesura; an insufficient breath, which terminates the opening period in mid-gesture: these Pope has imitated with the care a Lichtenstein bestows on comic book panels, or a Warhol on soup labels.”

Dylan got this not only from the american songbook, but, evidently, from Eliot. The wasteland is the easiest modernist masterpiece to read because Eliot, too, has a certain devastating talent for interrupting the elegy form with the banal conversational tag. It was what Berryman was doing in the sixties, too. If you have a taste for it, as I do, it is what you crave in poetry and in song. It is the hardest thing to do in the world, although it looks like the easiest.

who's the rapist now? Donald, Bill and the Press

I've been thinking about the press and their disservice to the public this election year. Specifically, the odd torpor they showed in investigating or even being interested in Trump's pathological love iife. Many people have told me that Trump's Access Hollywood remarks are only one in a series of racist and sexist remarks, and are nothing special. For liberals, I think this is definitely true. But the republican party, and America, has long had a large population of conservatives who claim, at least, to find the character of their leaders as important as their policies. This constituency is served when the issue has to do with Democrats. From Gary Hart to Bill Clinton, the press was interested and investigative when it came to their sex lives. But when it came to Trump, until he was already a candidate and it was already October, they''ve been inert, disinterested, lazy and hopeless. For them, Trump speaking out against St. McCain was sin enough. But it would be too "low" to investigate, say, Trump and the Playboy culture.
Interesting this word "low". Cause what is low, what is tabloid, comes down to revealing things having to do with women. In the male world of politics, and make no mistake, this is patriarchy armed, a politicians "private life" is sacrosant - until it isn't. And even then it is considered low.
That's bullshit, of course. Politics infuses our sexual relationships. Especially if those relationships are combined with the power of money or position.
On the other side of this is another liberal maxim: Bill Clinton's private life has nothing to do with this election. It is simply sexism, making Hilary Clinton an appendage of her male partner.
Trumpites have a point that this is a way of getting over a problem. Do a thought experiment. What if Hilary Clinton was married to Donald Trump? Would one, as a liberal, think this was just not our business? Would we just be happy to see Donald Trump as the first man? I'd say this is bullshit. Bill Clinton ran very much on the platform that his wife would be an important part of his administration. In fact, she did admirable things then. She spoke out about feminism and human rights, she opposed the appalling bankruptcy bill, and she put her input into healthcare issues.
So, I think a voter has every right to consider Bill Clinton. Myself, Clinton's posse appalls me. I put that down as a definite negative. But I support HRC because there are more positives, as for instance her pledges about childcare, about the minimum wage, etc. I think she has been pushed to the left. I don't trust that she might turn to the right once she is in office, but I am hoping that the left is resurgent enough in the Dem party to give her no cover for that.
Everybody says this is the election from hell. And it is true, it is like being forcefed some awful combination of the Apprentice and the Aryan Nation power hour. But it is, to say the least, diagnostic.
Very.

living in the pre-Freudian age

I just finished the slyly debunking article about the “girl in the dark” in last week’s New Yorker. The girl in the dark is a woman named Lyndsey (or not – that is her pseudonym) who began to experience such violent bodily reactions to light  that she quit her job and made the house she shared with her husband into a blacked out den in order to survive.  

Ed Caesar, the author of the article, never comes out and says that he believes the condition is psychosomatic, but the article obviously tips that way. Lyndsey strongly objects to this interpretation. To her, this is a way of dismissing the condition, or blaming her for it, instead of finding out what it “really is.”

I was struck by how we have regressed to a pre-Freudian era in the terms that are set for illnesses and conditions.

There’s an obvious antinomy in the argument that psychosomatic conditions aren’t real.  The ground of that objection is based in a sort of common folk psychological positivism, a naïve materialism. The argument goes that an illness or something with sickness like symptoms is real if you can trace the cause back to some alien presence in the body – a virus, a bacteria – or some genetic or natal cause. Otherwise, the symptom or disease like condition is not real, in as much as its cause is some idea. It is, instead, feigned. However, how would feigning be possible if ideas in some sense had no effect on the physiological condition of the body? Once we grant that the effect can occur, we have granted another causal route for bodily conditions. We don’t really have to go too far afield in our folk interpretations of our actions to see the most commonplace instances of this. I have an idea that I want to run, so I run. Running causes my heart to beat faster and my breathing to quicken. Nobody would say that the heart beating faster and the breathing wasn’t real. One might say, however, that I was proximately responsible for this by my decision to run. We can change our example and make the responsibility charge (which, I should point out, is a term that is overdetermined – it is not just a way of talking about a cause, but a way of talking about the morality of an act) a little fuzzier. I’m afraid of heights. When, for instance, I went up with A. to have drinks on top of a swank L.A. hotel, recently, I experienced some slight physiological changes and a great deal of a sort of proprioceptive mental discomfort that I cannot trace back to a decision I made, as in the running case. Instead, the phobia has a subconscious status. I am aware of it, but I can’t turn it off and on in the way I can the decision to run. Even those peope who are resistant to the idea of a subconscious would probably try to pursuade me to treat it like running or other actions I turn off and on, implicitly acknowledging that it has another footing. In habit, say.

The point is, whether Lyndsey’s condition comes from chemicals or a virus or something unconscious,  it is in as much as she feels it real. A therapist might speak of Lyndsey’s unconscious decision to feel in a certain way, using the model of decision-making that would put the idea on the same plane as the decision to run, but this is a simplification and distortion of the unconscious idea. Eventually, Freud, needing “deciders”, came up with a topography of the self that included the ego, the id, and the superego. It is not clear, however, that decision actually describes the effect of an idea on the unconscious level.

The unconscious is back in style, scientifically, although neurologists try to make clear that they are not talking about the yucky Freudian unconscious, with all that sex going on. This unconscious is sexless and data driven. It has become obvious that we take in far more sense data than we can consciously process. It has to go somewhere. The popular model for this is the User illusion – taken from computers. Users downloading a file will look at the little graph showing the file being downloaded as if it is connected to the activity, instead of being a mere icon pointing to the activity going on, and thus unconnected to it in a real sense – in the same way that the blinking light warning you to get oil for your car is not the thing you pour the oil over when you get the oil.  The user illusion idea is that mostly we deal with icons in our consciousness  instead of the real processes going on in our unconscious.

This view of the unconscious dovetails with Freudian theory much more than the neurologists and pop scientists think. That is because most of them have never read Freud at all, but have read magazine articles about what a kook Freud was. Oh well.

The violent resistance to the suggestion that a symptom or condition can have its ultimate cause in the unconscious is another symptom of the flatheadedness of our time. On the other hand, the original Freudian therapeutic impulse, which was about understanding our unconscious idea and thus ‘curing’ the condition or syndrome, seems to have been way too optimistic. What changes the body necessarily operates through the bodies tools, and corporal tendencies can reinforce themselves in different ways once a condition is established. It is likely that if Lyndsey were really suffering from some psychosomatic condition, she would really need certain physical treatments. My point is that the rejection of the psychosomatic is something encouraged by the positivist trend in medical science that is ultimately therapeutically unsound. 

The unconscious – can’t live with it, can’t live without it. 

Jules Renard I

Jules Renard is one of the great untranslateables, everybody says. Although his Poil de Carotte is a classic French children’s book – or rather, classic book about children, more Huck Finn than Tom Sawyer – and though his posthumously published Journal is considered one of the great (although eccentric) books of the fin de la siecle, his  name resonates only with diehard francophiles among us speakers of that mongrel Normand dialect,  English, people like Julian Barnes, who wrote a great essay about him. Perhaps the Journal awaits a translator of genius, who might do for Renard what Barbara Wright did for Queneau – translate not just the letter but the spirit.  Like the difference between a freshly opened bottle of  champaign and that same bottle the next morning, the difference between the original ane the translation can be that the latter “goes flat.” Technically, the translation can get the glossary right without being able to capture the bubbles, the irrepressible spirits in the original. This is why poetry is so much harder to translate than prose – why Montaigne is part of English literature and Du Bellay is not.     

Renard’s Journal was published – in a version that was censored by his widow – in three fat tomes in the nineteen twenties. In the Pleiade edition, this adds up to a fat  thousand pages. The  book became quite faddish in the 30s. Nibbles from  it were translated by Louise Brogan in the 60s, and the reviews congratulated her for not heaving the whole whale  into English. But a greatest hits approach does the Journal an injustice. I think its equivalent is that strange thing,  essoa’s Book of Disquiet, with its mixture of autobiography and revery. Renard had a weakness for aphorism – he was a man of the theater, he liked lines – and he produces them next to things described, situations deciphered, self-analysis, and dialogues that were obviously caught on the wing. A writer’s workshop, in other words.  

 Here are two aphorisms.

“My past is three fourths of my present. I dream more than I live, and I dream backwards.”

“I don’t know if God exists. But it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.”

The first one is close to Pessoa, the second to Nietzsche – at least the Nietzsche of Dawn.

One of the great readers of the Journal was Samuel Beckett. As his friends testify, Beckett would read them bits from the Journal. When, briefly, he taught French at Trinity in Dublin, he assigned Renard. According to all the Beckett biographers, he used Renard’s dry style of observation and noting of things said in getting beyond, or out of, Joyce-land.  The last entry in the Journal is pretty much the seed for Beckett’s triology. “Last night, I wanted to get up. Dead weight. A leg hung outside. Then a trickle runs down my leg. I allow it to reach my heel before I make up my mind. It will dry in the sheets, like when I was a redheaded boy.” That’s a pretty fine finis.

Beckettians have noticed Renard. But Beckett was not the only Renard reader – Sartre read him too, and had his say in a 1945 essay that ended up in Situations I: The Man who was all tied up. L’homme ligoté.  I have not found an English translation of this essay, even though it is Sartre’s most compact look at modernist literature. I am going to look at this next.  

the human geography of attention

The term allergy was invented in 1906. In Mark Jackson’s Allergy: history of a modern malady, it is noted that the man who invented the term, Clemens von Pirque recognized there was something counterintuitive in a disease that seemed to orginate in the immunity to disease. On the  other hand, in 1906, the wonders of the human immune system were not well known.

There was some resistance to this linguistic newcomer – I’m tempted to say that the term allergy was treated as an allergen. Jackson’s book is about how the disease – or condition – took off in the 20^th century.  That is, the prevalance rate for allergies climbed throughout the century. Other diseases – tuberculosis and polio – did not – they, famously, declined. And they declined not just because cures were found for them, but also because – at least in the case of tuberculosis – there was a concerted public health effort to alter the environments that favored tuberculosis. It is always worth remembering that the greatest medicine broadcast in the twentieth century was public sewers. Rene Dubos, in a famous study, showed that tuberculosis was declining precipitantly before the advent of drugs to treat it. He also made a strong case for the idea that tuberculosis skyrocket in the 19^th century due to the environmental changes brought about by industrialization. Or perhaps I should say: changes in human geography.  Similarly, it is rare tht one hears of someone dying of stomach cancer nowadays, even though, worldwide, it is the fifth most common cause of death by a malignancy. In the US, it used to be a bigger killer than lung cancer. Epidemiologists have shown that the decline can be directly linked – some say up to 50 percent - to the refrigerator. In those regions of the world where food is still preserved by using salt, stomach cancer is relatively common. Even in the refrigerated countries, incidence are climbing again, due to obesity.

It is interesting to compare the discovery and investigation of allergies as “industrial” conditions with the discovery of attention deficit disorder, or ADHD. Our attention landscape has not been mapped very well.  I like some attempts: for instance, Jonathan Crary’s excellent book about the attention crisis in the 19^th century, Suspensions of Perception. But there’s no systematic mapping of the changes wrought by, say, literacy. Literacy is often treated as an unmitigated good. How can anybody be against literacy? But the question is not whether literacy is good of bad, the question is whether the increase in literacy and the creation of human landscapes that incorporate literacy on a large scale has created a psychological neurological response among a certain portion of the population that feeds into ADHD. The landscape changes have been rapid and recent. A relatively short time ago – in 1900 – in the US, for instance, half the population was rural. In 1910, only 35 percent of 17 year olds were in high school – the majority of kids stopped their education at the 8^th grade level. Education and literacy are, among other things, experiments. It wouldn’t surprise me if an attention landscape that favored one form of perceptual interaction  would produce attention casualties when the landscape shifted. It would also, of course, privilege certain individuals that the previous attention landscape handicapped. To quote from Jackson’ book about allergies: “As Ludwik Fleck insisted in 1927, diseases should not be regarded as stable natural

entities but as ‘ideal fictitious pictures . . . round which both the individual and the variable morbid phenomena are grouped, without, however, ever corresponding completely to them’.

If the attention required by literacy is qualitatively different, so, too, is the attention required for driving a car. In fact, it would be interesting to me to see if attention micor-environments don’t conflict with each other. Is it possible that the attention required for going at 60 miles per hour, judging other cars, stopping, starting, the whole range of attention tasks required by the automobile, is in conflict with the attention required for looking at equations being put up on a blackboard and taking a written test?

gender and the three year old

 The the box that says “knows difference between boys and girls” , which figured in the sheet about Adam’s progress at school, has been checked for more than a year – along with “can wash hands” and “can draw line on paper unassisted”. But I did not realize that Adam, who is now two months from four, had become fully baptised in the world of gender until this morning, when he informed me that he couldn’t like Princess Leia because he was a boy.  He liked Luke Skywalker.

Of course, this was going to come. The river of time  that carries us onward, helpless strivers against the flow – I know about it, see it on my face every day. Noooovemberrr …. Deceeeeemmmmber. Sing it Frank! But  the decision that, as a boy, he can’t like Princess Leia,  is, nevertheless, a mark, a milestone of some kind, a bit of telling turbulence in the river’s flow.  

In the afterword that Ursula Le Guin wrote to Left Hand of Darkness in 1975 (Is Gender Necessary), she makes certain comments about gender that she radicalized in 1985 when she reprinted the essay. For instance, in 1975 she did not notice how hetero her story was – while in 1985 she criticizes herself for this. What strikes me from the first essay is that she talks of her book as a thought experiment: what would happen if you eliminate gender in the world?

As Le Guin recognizes in her essay, that elimination was not thorough. For instance, gender comes back in the pronoun “he” or “him” that dogs us in English when we want to refer to some ungendered previous noun – an actor, a worker, a person in a crowd, etc.  In 1985, Le Guin came out for substituting “they” and “them” for the he and him, pointing out that the masculine pronouns were introduced into English in the 16^th century, and that in the common tongue, they and them still live.

I wonder about the project. Why eliminate gender, after all? It seems that Le Guin’s first view is that gender is always a product of fundamentallly unequal social relations between men and women. Is it possible, however, that fundamentally equal social relations would simply produce another style of gender?

Having never lived in a society with fundamentaly equal social relations, I have no data to point to. Philosophically, however, I think that the social logic of gender need not be sexist. I would like Adam to consider whether he likes or doesn’t like Princess Leia on a different basis than that of being a boy. On the other hand, I want him to enjoy being a boy. I want him to like it. I think that not liking it does lead, all other things being equal, to the kind of resentments that flow into the collective sexist disposition, the poison swamp of a million comments sections.

I was reading a German novel a couple of days ago and the author made an excellent remark: our education, or at least our sentimental education, of children makes it the case that children learn, by the end of childhood, how to be a child. But it is the nature of the case that they cannot, at that point, learn how it is to be an adult. And just as adulthood starts, education stops.

This, I would say, is another way of pointing to the fundamental place of philosophy in education, which never stops. But that is my prejudice, eh?  

  

josh marshall, national character, and where our wisdom comes from

I’m very familiar with the kind of barfly thumbnail sketch that sums up whole peoples. It is a hard vice to suppress. I do it. The English this, the French that. In the last couple days, one of those sketches, this one of the knout-lovin’ Russians, was twitted by Josh Marshall, a Clintonite liberal. He was attacked for it, and instead of saying I’m just tweating, he dug in and defended himself as a deep cultural observer of the Russians.

My Dad used to do the same thing, although I think he had more excuse, having grown up in an ethnically mixed neighborhood in Syracuse NY in the 30s and 40s, when folk wisdom about different national characters was unquestioned.

The Marshall twitterstorm reminded me of something I wrote in the early Bush era. Here it is.

Hume, Huxley, and war

The importance of distance should never be under-estimated. Heidegger, whose defense of Nazi-ism is well known, is continually being rediscovered (surprise) as the rotten bug under the rug of continental philosophy; that Derrida relies so much upon his work has been discussed in the terms one would usually reserve for talking about hiring Typhoid Mary to cook the cutlets in some local dinner. Yet who cares that David Hume, the surely one of the roots of English philosophy and its rather sterile offshoot, analytic philosophy, had, shall we say, rather dim views about blacks during a period in which the trade in black flesh (and the attendant destruction of African culture) was at its height? LI was pondering this while reading, yesterday, Thomas Huxley’s excellent Victorian study of Hume. Huxley himself is rather impatient with the “nonsense” that is usually ground out about race and national character. We like Huxley for that. We like Huxley for his reasons for embracing Darwinism. And more than that - we actually like Hume. But we have to admit that Hume admitted to the inroads of prejudice in spite of his philosophical degree zero, his wariness in the presence of generalizations. Here is what Hume has to say about race:

"I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation.... Such a uniform and constant difference [between the negroes and the whites] could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men.... In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly."

This was from his essays, which Huxley justly celebrates. On the whole, Hume’s essays are under-appreciated today, except by libertarians and fans of Adam Smith. That’s because, before Adam Smith, Hume put into theoretical language a lot of what we now consider the foundations of classical political economy.

It is hard to swallow apercu like the above, however. One’s inclination is to think that such thoughts have no influence, really, on, say, Hume’s epistemology. Perhaps this says something about the success of analytic philosophy in convincing its constituency that philosophy consists of isolated areas of focus - epistemology, ontology, ethics, etc. - which are logically separated from each other. Really, though, I think it is that we – or at least “we” whites - are far enough away from the slave trade, as opposed to the Holocaust, not to feel it in the skin, like some old war wound. But it is an old war wound, nonetheless. A hole in the side of the world.

Analytic philosophers -- and, even more, the incompetent commentators on philosophy in the popular press -- are much more eager to discuss the influence of Heidegger’s Nazi-ism on his ontology than they are to bracket it, and discuss the ontology alone. We are being a little unfair: Hume never claimed that his epistemology was interwoven with his racism, as Heidegger claimed that his encounter with Seyn was interwoven with Hitler. Still, frankly owning up to a belief in black inferiority, especially during a time when Scottish merchants were making a pretty penny in selling blacks on the theory of that inferiority, should raise some questions about Mr. Hume. However, I doubt they ever will.

The tremendous influence of this contempt for a ‘lower’ race has never, really, been traced to its most extreme ends in all the branches of our history.   But when we hear casual remarks about the war of civilizations, and about ‘reforming’ the Islamic world, we have to wonder whether the speakers have any acquaintance with western civilization, besides driving in its huge cars and admiring its overpasses and malls. We live on a very thin crust of liberalism. It is about forty years old – a little younger than me. That the inheritors of the most vigorous opponents of the liberal mindset - the people who opposed civil rights for blacks, women, and the working class for the better part of American history, those who defended lynch law, laws to break up unions, and opposed giving women legal equality with men -  now casually claim this as their heritage and their sanction for making war on the benighted has to be an irony worthy of one of Hardy’s poems. No, ‘we’ are enmeshed in the dark ignorance in the belly of the beast still. It takes centuries to get through Moloch.   

trump and the racism of the 1 percent

Jon Stewart did a funny bit on the Stephen Colbert show – the Tonight show – during the Republican convention. He showed a collage of Fox news footage. In one piece, one of the Fox talking heads said that Trump was a “working class billionaire”. Stewart pulled the deadpan face and said, no. The audience laughed.

The joke, however, this campaign is on us. For as the press has infinitely analyzed Trump’s campaign, it has focused very much on the racist working class folk who support Trump. It has focused not at all on the 1 percent class, into which Trump was born, and where he has spent his whole life. It is as if his racial attitudes came to him during that brief period when he was kidnapped and held in a neo-Nazi mobile home.

What is it about that 1 percent? Remember that it is almost 96 percent white – the superclass is the whitest class in the nation. Remember, too, that it is the most ardent Republican voting class in the country. And one can cunclude that… oh, look over there, some fat white construction worker is holding a confederate flag!

The racism of the upper class is never, ever the focus of newspaper article or thumbsucker pieces. So much is it ignored that it is as if it doesn’t exist. If it does exist, then perhaps one should ask questions about that class – but to do that is to impugn, even tacitly, the owners of the media. So … look over there, some fat white woman who works at Walmart is showing a confederate flag!

The focus will always be on the mobile home crowd. The crowd that owns summer homes in the Hamptons and winter homes in Palm Springs, that goes to almost exclusively white clubs and presides over white corporate boards, they get a pass. The leaner-inners, the CEOs, the Quants at the Hedge fund, the numerous, numerous heirs of the 100 great American fortunes as they were listed in the 1940s – our meritocrats, our best and the brightest! – are not even slightly questioned when one of their number goes around talking about Mexican rapists and black thugs. Nobody so far as I have seen goes to seek out the opinions on race and gender at the Mar-a-Lago club. When George Saunders reported on Trump supporters for New Yorker, he confine himself to those in the crowds listening to him. Doubtless it is much harder to interview members of the various Palm Beach clubs.

When Beyonce says, in Formation,  "You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making / 'Cause I slay / I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making", there’s a certain pathos to the phrase. No white singer would say, you might just be the white Bill Gates. Although African Americans make up 12.2 percent of the population, they make up 1.4 percent of the wealthiest 1 percent. This, this is no accident.

So, the next time you hear a funny joke about Trump’s racist followers, remember, the jokes on us. Cause his people rule us.      

My problematic liberalism

Although I try, most of the time, to be a good American liberal, there is only so much I can take before the un-American Marxist in my soul shows up and mugs my cut-out.

For instance: lately I’ve been noticing a meme that has migrated from Romney’s campaign into the analysis of good liberals. We all remember, I hope, the makers and the takers. According to a speech Romney made to some halfwit club of greedheads, in the US, 47 percent were on the dole, of one type or another – takers. Which left only 52 percent makers. Romney didn’t even have to wink to imply that of that 52 percent, a good 90 percent were losers.

When a film of this warm encounter between Romney and his deepest admirers surfaced, he obfuscated it all. But good liberals served up the incident as an x ray into what Romney really thought.

That was then. Lately, I’ve noticed that “populism” or whatever it is called is being hauled over the coals by true liberals, dismayed by the way the plebes have not been following the program. Two instances really attracted my attention.

One was a very well publicized report by George Saunders on the Trump campaign. Saunders, tossing aside any economic explanation of discontent as too much blah blah blah, made a heartfelt comparison between those discontented with the state of things in America and himself as an engineering student. In his account, he was not a very good engineering student. So he compensated by blasting better engineering students and generally not recognizing that he just wasn’t good enough.

“In college, I was a budding Republican, an Ayn Rand acolyte. I voted for Reagan. I’d been a bad student in high school and now, in engineering school, felt (and was) academically outgunned, way behind the curve. In that state, I constructed a world view in which I was not behind the curve but ahead of it. I conjured up a set of hazy villains, who were, I can see now, externalized manifestations, imaginary versions of those who were leaving me behind; i.e., my better-prepared, more sophisticated fellow-students. They were, yes, smarter and sharper than I was (as indicated by the tests on which they were always creaming me), but I was . . . what was I? Uh, tougher, more resilient, more able to get down and dirty as needed. I distinctly remember the feeling of casting about for some world view in which my shortfall somehow constituted a hidden noble advantage.”

Of course, now, now George Saunders isn’t a Ayn Rand acolyte, but a man of liberal sentiments who, of course, recognizes that some people – the people ahead of the curve, apparently – just merit their positions, and we can recognize that while all doing our best to make sure our kids go to Ivy League schools or something. We can lean in, that is it, that’s what we can do. As for the rest, they can watch their tacky tv or something. In fact, perhaps we can call the ahead of the curve group makers, and the others takers… But since Saunders is now firmly liberal, and he’s writing for the firmly liberal New Yorker,  he isn’t going to go that far explicitly.  What he does do is the Clinton watusi about how this is already a great country and shouldn’t we be unified? And doesn’t it depress us that a lot of angry people haven’t given up their sophomoric idea that they deserve better? Of course, this all plugs into Unity, a description of collective agreement that  has somehow transmorgified into some kind of liberal virtue in the last couple of years.  

A more straightforward Romneyism comes overseas from the LRB. John Lancester is lamenting Brexit, and he comes, reluctantly, to the core of the thing, the people who voted for Brexit:

“The people in the rich parts of the country pay the taxes which support the poor parts. If I had to pick a single fact which has played no role in political discourse but which sums up the current position of the UK, it would be that most people in the UK receive more from the state, in direct cash transfers and in benefits such as health and education, than they contribute to it. The numbers are eerily similar to the referendum outcome: 48 per cent net contributors, 52 per cent net recipients.”

This did make me wonder whether it was the rich parts or the poor parts who benefited from the  1, 162 billion  pounds of government outlay for the banks – that's a trillion some for you pikers out there - but I realize that this is still only cheap liberalism. The unrepentant Marxist in me remembered something that is now deeply unpopular to even mention. It is called the level of exploitation. It is the theory that wealth is not the product of management or of clever bets in the stock market. Rather it is the cumulative effect of  the labor of the workers. It is even, according to this theory, the surplus labor value – the amount taken from the worker by capital – that supports the entire structure of capital.

Silly silly silly of course. And yet, without that theory, what you get, eventually, is Romneyism.

And I’m one of those people who are in the just say no to Romneyism camp, even if it comes from various rich journalists and writers who are totally out there for, say, transgender rights. Cause I’m remembering that transgender folks, like everybody else, work. And the majority of them work for the man, and are skinned by the man.

Remembering the real source of productivity and of wealth is a very hard thing to do when it is a truth universally denied in the mainstream press. Nevertheless, I’m for remembering it.  

ambition and the novel

The first novels examined in Peter Brooks’  Reading For the Plot come from the nineteenth century, and in particular, the French nineteenth century. Putting such enormous critical stress on Balzac, Stendhal and Zola helps Brooks maintain his historical thesis  - that the novel is in rapport with the bourgeois revolution in values, which changed the meaning of ambition in the stereotypical life cycle. It isn’t that the bourgeois ethos encourages unilaterally the valorization  of ambition, in contradiction to the norms of the ancien regime; but ambition becomes an intrinsic part of plotting.

“The ambitious heros of the 19^th century novel – those of Balzac, for instance – may regularly be conceived as ‘desiring machines’ whose presence in the text sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire… Etymology may suggest that the self creates a ‘circle’ – an ambitus – or aureola around itself, mainly in front of itself.”

This interesting but awkwardly phrased notion of the ambitus (is the circle in front of the self a projection?) is, to my mind, a potent hint at the role ambition plays both within and without the novel. Ambition is a capturing passion – it doesn’t desire to incorporate the circled objects so much as to hold them, to an extent, hostage. Outside the novel, ambitiom is given now a positive, now a negative meaning, an ambiguity generated in a commercial society that has secularized charisma as salesmanship without quite being comfortable at the fundamental substitutability of all things – including the self – implied by the universal dissolvant of capitalism.

Joanne Bamberger has written that Hillary Clinton’s ambition is negatively coded, in contrast to the praise male politicians receive for being ambitious. I’m not sure that she is right about all male politicians – especially her example, which is Obama. Obama’s ambition to be president in 2008 was regularly mocked as overreach for a man whose whole experience in politics was rather shortlived. However, Bamberger has a point that ambition for a woman is often viewed as a negative – the archetype of Lady Macbeth is just below the surface in certain attacks on Clinton.

The shift in the value attached to ambition derives I think from the way the social unconscious invests in the the image of the ambitus. On the one hand, we within the circle participate, by proximity, to the charismatic and, ultimately, divine. On the other hand, reverse the values and we within the circle participate, unwillingly, in the abject and the soiled.  Aversion transforms proximity into infection.

In the American novel, under the sign of ambition, there is a pattern of such transformations from infatuation to aversion. You can see this kind of mechanism at work in Dreiser’s novels. And yet that novel type is, to contemporary readers, I think, a little too transparent. Or at least it is in the novel – it lives happily in film.

Outside of the sign of ambition, though, a strange thing happens in the novel. The protagonist falls into despair – or at least the threat of despair becomes one of the great patterns in the non-realistic novel. That despair arises from the fact that, without ambition, the novel itself, and the narrative logic of the world by which the protagonist parses the world, is fundamentally threatened. The spirit around the social that makes acts and events meaningful, in commercial society, is exorcized, but no ready replacement comes into view. The non-ambitious self confronts a world of pure, baseless induction, of sequences that are purely conjunctive, but void of life. In fact, without ambition, the self confronts its own routines as malevolent and other. This is the dark side of the futurist exhiliration in de-routinizing the given – without some utopian ambition that lends to the de-routinized moment some satisfying sense of  authenticity, the de-routinized just becomes a reminder of hopelessly one is bound to routine, as an intimate enemy, an irrational tic for which there is no cure. 

just say no to freakonomic parenting

There’s a lovely passage in an essay by Cynthia Ozick about the trick of personal identity. She is writing about seeing herself as an old woman, and feeling a certain “generational pang” about seeing young people rise up in the literary world that she has long been part of.

“All the same, whatever assertively supplanting waves may lap around me – signals of redundancy, or of superannuation – I know I am held fast. Or, rather, it is not so much a fixity of self as it is of certain exactnesses, neither lost nor forgotten; a phrase, a scene, a voice, a momment. These exactnesses do not count as memory, and even more surely escape the net of nostalgia or memoir. They are platonic enclosures, or islands, independent of time, though not of place: in short, they irrevocably are. Nothing can snuff them.”

This exactness of the person is what so painfully escapes me, what so painfully is missing, when I read about parenting. Amy Davidson, in this week’s New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/parenting-in-an-age-of-economic-anxiety reviews what is surely the stupidest guide to parenting ever monstrously given birth to by a publishing house: “The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know—Your Kids” 

The title is merely the diving board of bad: from Davidson’s account, it gets badder and badder. Davidson’s review is a roundup of parenting books, and all of them share the characteristic that there is no exactness in them – either for the kids or the parents. The only desire the parents have is, apparently, order and peace. This is the setup from the getgo.

“Say that you have two children, or maybe three, and that they fight for what’s theirs. The contested objects are many: cake, Lego sets, the right to various household electronics or to name the family dog. And the children aren’t pleasant about it: they torment each other, and engage in guerrilla tactics distinguishable from those of ruthless insurgents only by their disregard for stealth, which might at least allow you, the parent, a little peace and quiet. Each of them has a story about fairness and what he deserves.”

The idea that contested objects are just there, and that adults are making no territorrial claims through those objects, seems pretty laughable. But it is laughable on a very political order: notice how the blank parents here are on one side, the side of the self evident, and the children on the other side, the side of the insurgents. Sound familiar? Yes, it is neo-colonialism coming to your living room. In that political environment, the freakanomics guide to childrearing is perfectly appropriate, since neo-liberalism is based on the premise that exactness is an obstacle – individuality is entirely defined by consumer choice. No voice, gesture or place that is immune from creative destruction and substitution.

Davidson, happily, is not endorsing the “game theorist” view of family management in her article, but she does, less happily, picture a family setting as a sort of blankness in which the libido plays no part. Parents are perfect little death drives, repetitious little automaton who only want peace. The peace, apparently, of deathly order. Children, as is weirdly common in articles about children, exist only as monsters of disorder. They are either stuffed and cute, or monstrous and quarreling. There is nothing to be thought about them – they do not give rise to thought.  Exactness here doesn’t have a place or name.

We are a long way from Spock and Dolto. I don’t like the journey, frankly, but I do find it noteworthy, inasmuch as it so exactly reflects the political moment.  

“What the book shares with the current parenting moment is the sense that trust is a commodity that’s in very short supply. Thomas, for example, is getting reasonable grades “in his elementary school’s gifted-and-talented program,” but is he really doing his best? Or is he “fibbing” about how hard he’s working, “thinking about Minecraft” when he should be hunkered down with his book project? Raeburn and Zollman suggest deploying the “principal-agent model” to manage the case of “possible underperformers such as Thomas,” with the caveat that, if the incentives are too great, he’d have good reason to cheat. Without measures like “perfect monitoring” and “credible threats” (“Parents and caregivers can use each other as Doomsday machines”), children will give in to a tendency to lie. In the world of game theory, this is not so much a moral problem as a practical one. Without constant child-control manipulations, the middle-class home will fall apart, and there are no limits to the anxiety this creates.”

I cant stand it. I just cant stand it, to quote charley brown quoting sam beckett.   

on not knowing what pokemon go is

To pay attention to pop culture takes energy – like anything else. One can choose to pay attention to, say, Taylor Swift’s feud with Kim Kardashian or not, but attention is not free, and the payoff is not guaranteed. Perhaps, in the end, the feud won’t amuse you. Perhaps it will even leave a sour feeling – you will feel like you didn’t want to go into it.

The pop culture rush, which is administered by thousands of media sites, is supposed to overwhelm any  prudence you might feel about your attention, and even make it laughable that you haven’t “given” it to some phenomenon that everybody knows about. Usually, the media sites can rely on shaming techniques among the audience, who will pick some certain piece of information and make the person who doesn’t know that piece of information feel embarrassed about his ignorance. Shame and information are linked from our earliest days. I see myself using shame, ocassionally, to make Adam know things. I find it weird, when I step back, that I do this. But I do.  Classrooms use this to the extent that a small, attenuated ring of shame is put around the “great books”, or about this or that piece of information in the sciences.

Myself, in the last few weeks I have run into mentions of Pokemon Go whenever I look at a newspaper or magazine. Pokemon go jokes are all over twitter. Yet, so far, I haven’t given my attention to it even to extent of knowing what it is.  Of course, saying this is rather like reversing the poles, and making knowing about Pokemon Go shameful; but I am not trying to head there – instead, the question is at what point a critical mass in pop culture makes one feel that this is something I have to know. Especially if you are a writer trying continually to get a fix on the culture, this is the kind of question you do have to ponder. James Joyce assumed that  a free lance marketer in Dublin in 1904  would know about the semi-smutty stories of Paul de Kock,  and about the paper Tit-bits, and about many of the day’s popular songs.  Ullyses is one of the few novels ever written that tries to exhaust the question of what a character at a given date in a given place would know. Since 1904, the intrusion of popular culture – of images, songs, and games – into the sphere of private life has become exponentially greater.  Even Joyce refined his references. Would a Leonard Bloom in 2016 know, or want to know, about Pokemon Go?

So far, my answer is no. It isn’t as important, or at least it doesn’t float in the semiosphere with such importance, that 2016 would not be describable without it. But I don’t exactly know how I know this. One creates a filter for pop culture information semi-consciously. As much as we live in a hype world, we don’t have a firm idea of where these filters come from. 

london calling opening

Where'd I see this guy? 

Last night we went to the opening of the London Calling show at the Getty. I hated the title, since the Clash song – which the DJ played as we ate fish and chips and drank our wine – is about rioting and the ice age (Thatcherism), not the particular bourgeois fantasies enacted in the paintings in the show. Not that I am criticizing those fantasies, far from it – but there was no punk sensibility there.

The works by Frank Auerbach, Leon Kosoff, Lucien Freud, R.B. Kitaj, and Michael Andrews – composed, according to the curator, Julian Brooks (I think – I couldn’t hear the name of the gent who was supposed to lead the invitees through the justification for the exhibition), a school of London that showed that New York critics who, in the fifties, had proclaimed the death of figuration were wrong. It was a pretty plain aesthetic argument, and I think a false one. Abstraction not only submerged figuration, it produced the conditions that would assure that its resurrection could only be as a damaged style. Indeed, for all Brooks’s burbling about Lucien Freud’s work showing the finest appreciation of the human figure since Rubins,  what was evident was how under the influence of the bomb and the scrawl these painters generally were. Figuration as damage, as casualty: this was the response to abstraction I saw.

My favorite was the Auerbach room. These were truly physical pictures, documents not only of choses vues but the aggregation of material, the clogging, in the visual channel, the eye brought down from its angelic flight into the nervy impulse that organizes it as a thing on a stalk. I’d like to look at those pieces again. I suppose the most famous pieces are the canonical ones in the Bacon room, although myself, I prefered the bicycle pic – a reminder that Bacon was, after all, Irish. I thought of Flann O’brian’s The Third Policeman, that eccentric paen to the bicycle.

What else? L.A., as always, looks terrific from the terrace – the twilight coming in, the mist (or smog, or is it ash?) over the buildings.

Lovely night, really.  

Politics and pathology

On January 17, 1989, a man named Patrick Edward Purdy took an AK 47 into a schoolyard in Stockton, California and opened up on the children, firing 105 rounds. He then killed himself. He was wearing a shirt that was inscribed with the phrase, Death to the Great Satin [sic], and he’d carved the word Hezbollah into the stock of his rife, as well as the words freedom and victory.  Nobody, then or now, has ever claimed that Purdy had the least relation with either Iran or Hezbollah.

I have been thinking of Patrick Edward Purdy as I’ve been reading about the latest slaughterer of children,  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, in Nice. Although I understand why Bouhlel is being discussed as a terrorist, to my mind he is closer to the Stockton murderer than the team that attacked in Paris last winter.  That is to say: if Hezbollah had not been fighting with the US, and had not gotten its name attached to the blowing up of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, I do not think Purdy would have carved their name into his rifle. Perhaps his desire to die would have taken another form.  I suspect that the same thing holds true for Bouhlel. His rapid “radicalisation”, as the police are putting it, was an act not of politics in the broad sense that would include the terror attacks in Paris (and the terror strafing of Yemen city neighborhoods by Saudi jets), but in the narrow sense of politics as a personal pathology. Madness calls to madness in some damaged neural pathway in the killer’s head.

One of the great changes that I have noticed, in the transition from the Cold War world to the post Cold War world, is the fading away of  peace as a political goal. It used to be a standard piece of political boilerplate: every political  candidate in the West was for peace – even if on terms defined by the overthrow of the other side. And the same was true of Soviet boilerplate.  I never thought I’d miss Cold War hypocrisy, but I do. Nixon’s gravelly unction voice saying peace was better than nobody saying peace, ever. Plans for peace – another boilerplate phrase – have gone the way of central planning.

Peace doesn’t break out spontaneously.  

As I was crossing the street yesterday, holding hands with my boy, a truck stopped for us. And I measured it with my eyes as we passed by it and I shuddered.  

woolf and free indirect discourse

Everybody remembers Virginia Woolf’s takedown of Arnold Bennett in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Few remember Bennett’s own takedown of Woolf, which occurred in his review of Jacob’s Room. In that review, Bennett wrote, “I have seldom read a cleverer book than Virginia Woolf, a novel which has made a great stir in a small world. It is packed and bursting with originality, and it is  exquisitely written. But the characters do not vially survive in the mind, because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness. I regard this book as characteristic of the new novelists who have recently gained the attention of the alert and the curious; and I admit that for myself I cannot yet descry any coming big novelists.”

In this rather short passage, the emphasis is on cleverness and originality, while, on a lower note, is the idea that this is a novel from and for a small world. The British have a peculiar aversion to the clever – it is a sort of disease, the kind of overthinking that can be overcome with mugs of ale and a lot of greasy food. Underneath the patronizing tone, though, is a serious point. Novels are about – centrally about – creating characters that leave a vital trace in the mind. They “survive” in the mind, having lived on the dead page. This was the principle upon which Bennett rested his confidence that all the cleverness in the world would not make a great, or a “big”, novel; it never occurs to him that something clever and original and that stirred a small world might be a counter-example. It might be that the possibilities of the novel were not exhausted or defined by making characters that survive in the mind. In which case, to go further, perhaps novels are not centrally defined by characters at all, but by a set of relations – for instance, of observations, of style, of the essay and the sketch – that make them, vaguely but definitely, novels.  

That would be one line of defense for Jacob’s Room; but Woolf chose another line, by challenging Bennett’s sense of character and how it is manifested – how, that is, from the dead paper it becomes a live ghost in the mind.

Woolf’s case is built on the division between the external and the internal. For Woolf, Bennett’s mistake is to make the former supreme, and to make the latter a metonym of it. First the house, then the furnishing, then the homeowner. Woolf’s objection is that the homeowner gets lost in the lavish description of the home and the furnishing. Instead of becoming vital, the homeowner becomes a mere token of a type – instead of a character, you have a chess piece. Woolf’s idea is that the motion from the external to the internal is ultimately subordinate to the opposite and primal movement – from the interior, from consciousness, to the exterior, the vast material dross of action and accumulation.

Woolf’s method has been taken to be a defense of subjectivism and of blurred description. These are in turn taken to be morally inferior to objectivity and clarity. However, the most cursory reading of Jacob’s room shows that the exquisite writing takes its sharpness from the external world. In fact, the writing is much less the kind of inward mullling of motive that takes up so much of James.  Woolf’s novel goes out into the streets of London, and into cafes, and into bedrooms, and is far from psychological in the traditional sense.  One has a clear scenic vision of things being experienced.

So what is the dispute about?To my mind, the internal/external division, which was at hand for Woolf, doesn’t quite get to the argument that she is making (which is a bold thing for me to say – and a sort of shitty thing as well, as though Woolf could not think through her own defense. I don’t think that – which would be as patronizing, on my part, as Bennett was on his - but I do think that the categories she was necessarily dealing with had to bend under her treatment in ways that resisted her message  – and that they could not bend enough because the vocabulary she needed wasn’t at hand).  I think what she is ultimately shooting at is what  linguists in the 1960s called free indirect discourse. Pasolini wrote about free indirect discourse in an essay collected in Heretical Empiricism, where he connnects it – that is, the appropriation and collaging of language (in accent, grammar, word choice, etc) – to the epic and the choral.  And to history – to what a Marxist would call dialectical materialism: “It is  certain that every time one has free indirect discourse this implies a sociological consciousness, clear or otherwise, in the author…”

Woolf was long ago stereotyped as impressionistic and lyrical – with the implication that it is other realistic novelists who have the  sociological consciousness. She wrote, so goes the rap, within her “small world”. But I think this is the difference in character building that her essay/reply to Bennett is talking about and taking apart. And I think what she is doing in practice is just this kind of epic scrounging in the fragments and accents of group consciousness.  Groupings – of the people in the Park in Mrs. Dalloway, or around a dinner table in To the Lighthouse, or in the London street in Jacob’s Room – are the central tableau against which consciousness happens in Woolf. One can speak of a collective consciousness, or at least a networked one, that gives us a much different notion of character than that bourgeois heroic one of Bennett’s.  This is where the lateral, seemingly random connections of free indirect discourse take on the task of character building – because what makes character is just this possibility of linguistic appropriation and use, this epic stealing of the words of another. It is not that this level of speech gives us a communism of understanding; instead, it is the ground of the possility of misunderstanding that makes individuality a fleeting thing, a task forever to be reenacted. Individuality is caught in the moment of misunderstanding others. That’s the paradox.  That we have moments of sympathy, of love, or of understanding, is not excluded by this, but the misunderstanding comes first, inherent to the particularity of the subject.  This is why Bennett’s method is so heavy and ultimately, for Woolf, counterproductive. Bennett’s materialism pretends that language is secondary, when the process of leaving a vital character in the mind is a linguistic one. What changed, Woolf implies, is that one has to be clever -- or one is forced to be vacant.  It is the great claustrophobic vacancy of description so dear to the hearts of the inheritors of the 19^th century novelistic tradition - that she wants to get rid of. It is not character they create, but dust collecting bric a brac.

against the imagination

Vico, in the early 18^th century, warned against the too extensive use of the “geometric” method in philosophy and the expulsion of rhetoric from the corpus. Twentieth century analytic philosophy is a viconian nightmare, but Vico’s worry that rhetoric would be expelled from the corpus was overblown. Instead, poetry returned under the aegis of a curious argument from imagination. Philosophical subcultures have formed around the consequences of imagining such things as zombies, or arguing about personal identity based on the tale of transposed selves going back to Locke (or, in reality, to Apuleius). The argument goes that the self is separable from the body of the self because we can imagine a dairymaid, say, transposed into the body of a king. Many subtle arguments have been  woven around such imaginary instances.

Myself, I like to imagine fantastic scenarios too. But the thing about most of them is that they never happen. In other words, the imaginative method is best for touching on what we don’t imagine. The fact or facts in natural history that have not been absorbed in our sense of the world, and, for that reason, that the imagination has yet to encounter. The personal identity argument is, to my mind, a case in point. We can well imagine a person’s mind being transposed into another person’s body. But what we see, overwhelmingly, is that this has never happened; nor have we any inkling that it will ever happen. This being the case, it seems that imagination, here, should lead us not to argue about what is proven by our imaginary case, but rather, what is proven by the insufficiency of our imagination to grasp one of the total facts of natural history. We should, I think, rethink what separability even means – and whether transposing an idea that originated in alchemy is valid in trying to understand other entities. The separability of the self and the body might well be imaginable only because the imagination is a crude concept mistaker, taking its mistaken presuppositions and projecting them on the world.

  This isn't what Vico meant at all, at all...

Neglected books Injury time

“I was reminded of the time a close friend visited my house ten minutes before the arrival of a gentleman caller.  I hinted it would be better if she left, but she said he wouldn’t notice she was there. To prove her point she plonked lumps of the children’s Plasticine in the middle of her forehead and chest, stuck darts in them, poured liberal quantities of tomato sauce down her person and lay flat on the sofa, groaning.

He won’t take it in, she said. Just wait and see.

Sure enough – he came in, glanced at her, sat down and complained that he’d had a devil of a day.” – Beryl Bainbridge, Diary

There’s a rather strange, hard to interpret story told in the Homeric hymn to Demeter. When Hades kidnapped the daughter of Demeter, Persephone, the goddess of harvests, wandered about the earth looking for her and refusing to do her job re the harvests. She came, starving and thirsty, to a hut in which an old woman named Baubo sat. Baubo tried to cheer the goddess up, but she remained wrapped in gloom, refusing to eat, until the old woman thought of a prank: she lifted up her skirts and flashed her private parts at the godddess, who then burst out laughing and accepted refreshment.

This story was preserved by the Christian apologists, notably Arnubius and Clement, who found the whole setup appalling. It is the type of humor that has long been considered appalling in the West, down to the present day, which is why it is generally an underground kind of humor.  The Christians certainly didn’t see anything funny about Baubo’s strip act; and indeed, the poet spends no time explaining what was so funny about the crone flashing her moneymaker. The joke is a sort of secret between Demeter and Baubo.

 I would put Beryl Bainbridge down as one of the holders of that secret. For Bainbridge, in some of her novels, particularly Injury Timen(1977), masters the difficult art of combining disasterous circumstances and sexual absurdity even unto rape and murder with the kind of laughter that wells up, in some, at funerals or solemn events – the laughter of embarrassed alienation I suppose you could call it. Or of an even more embarrassing recognition that the solemnity eerily recapitulates the serious play of children.  

Bainbridge is in rare company in this regard. In America, there are traits of the Baubo style in some of Dorothy Parker’s short stories; in the seventies, Iris Owens, after writing pornography under various pseudonyms, gave it a shot with After Claude, introducing, in Harriet, her narrator, one of the most unlikeable protagonists to ever rampage drunkly through a novel and refuse to leave the apartment of an ex boyfriend . The British sit com Absolutely Fabulous and the comedian Sarah Silverman have a bit of Baubo in them. Perhaps the writer who most explicitly explores the secret is Christina Stead, whose character Henny, in The Man who loved Children, coalesces her whole life around it, pitting this mystery against her hated husband Sam’s totalitarian optimism.

  … what a moral, highminded world their father saw! But for Henny there was a wonderful particular  world, and when they went with her they saw it: they saw the fish eyes, the crocodile grins, the hair like a birch broom, the mean men crawling with maggots, and the chilfren restless as an ell, that she saw. She did not often take them with her. She preferred to go out by herself and mooch to the bargain basements and ask the young man in the library what was good to read, and take tea in some obscure restaurant, and wander desolately about criticizing shopwindows and wondering if, in this street or that, she would yet, ‘old as I am looking like a black hag’,  meet her fate. Then she would come home, next to some girl “from a factory who looked like a lily and smelled like a skunk cabbage”, flirting with all the men and the men grinning back…”

Bainbridge died a revered novelist in England, but most of the reverence was for the historical novels she wrote after Young Adolf in 1978.

Historical fiction is an uncertain category which, on an expansive interpretation, encompasses everything from War and Peace to Gravity’s Rainbow; but on a narrower interpretation, concerns those fictions in which some past incident is re-enacted with an abundance of detailing, in response to a miniaturist’s compulsion to get the décor right. It reminds me of the compulsive pleasure some people find in building model boats in bottles. Toby Litt has suggested that historical novels are written and read in bad faith, vacillating between the transcendence of imaginative freedom and the facticity of information – those details! This doesn’t bother me so much. What does bother me is the sense of thwarted play, the sense that the writer is operating within some manufactured enclosure that limits her reach for reasons extrinsic to the aesthetic act – those details again.

Bainbridge’s career as a novelist neatly splits, then, between those first novels, with their Baubodian humor, and the novels of her last period, in which the world given was not so much Bainbridge’s as the period in which she placed her characters. The first novels troubled even those reviewers that conceded the brilliance of the style. The rapes, murders, psychotic children that formed the background against which totally self-involved characters worried about other things produced a laughter that the reader felt, vaguely, should be suppressed. In America, Injury Time was reviewed by Katha Pollitt with such incomprehension – Pollitt thought the novel was trying to make some op ed point about the awfulness of modern times – that I can only feel that some vast cultural gap lay between the writer and the reader.

In fact, the urban locale of Injury Time  with its obscene drunks sitting in rubbish by the side of the street, it casually criminal transvestites, its fat upper class men so confused by the ceaseless moral double accounting they keep in their head as to be totally vulnerable to the least glitch in practical life are things that I can look up and see, here,now, in Santa Monica, 2016. It is the world in which beggary has returned, symptomatic of a much deeper illness in capitalism. In that sense, far from writing in the style of the op ed, Bainbridge was seeing how the op ed mindset in the governing class was more and more detached from the reality of the street.

The odd couple at the center of the novel, Edward, an upper class accountant, and Binny, his “mistress” (as Edward tells others, since Binny hit him when he once called her that), a woman of no visible means of support living in a house in some outer fringe of London. In brief, the plot revolves around a dinner party that Binny holds for Edward, one of his clients, Simpson, and his client’s wife, Muriel. The dinner party is interrupted, and the house taken over, by a criminal gang that is being chased by the police. They remain in the house for perhaps a day, smashing it up, humiliating Edward and Simpson, and trying to find a way out of the police siege. In the course of the hostage taking, the leader of the gang, Ginger, rapes Binny.

This of course doesn’t’ sound like a laff riot. That it is funny owes everything to Bainbridge’s style. There are hints of the camp genius of Joe Orton in her dialogue (the characters throughout fail to communicate with each other on the simplest level, due to misunderstanding, drunkeness, panic, exhaustion, and their false assumptions one about the other), and partly her way of using the dramatist’s trick of shifting the spotlight from one character to the other as  they mull thoughts that are at utter variance with what the other characters are either thinking or trying to convey.  

Comedy is a soap bubble, and you can’t simply take out a slice of it and show it around, because it won’t be funny anymore.  Its all too pop-able. Everything in the novel is brilliantly timed – from the way we receive “information” (all recited facts suffer from terminal deformation as they are passed from Edward to Binny to Simpson to Muriel) to the way the confusion of the hostage taking is allowed to remain confusing, for different reasons, for each of the characters. That is a very difficult thing to do, since the authorial impulse is to clear up confusion, rather than let it play itself out. The latter seems, to the cautious author, to come  dangerously near to confusing the audience, and in the realistic paradigm of fiction, confusing the audiencce is a grave fault. But confusion is as much a part of the world as clouds. And all Bainbridge’s characters are as seriously confused as, well, I am, and you are, reader. Clarity is a rare thing.

Enough – I would like to quote at length, but I’ll forebear.   

neglected books: skepticism and animal faith

George Santayana has always been the odd man out among the great American philosophers. The native genius of American philosophy sprang from a pragmatism shot through with Emerson’s transcendental occasions;  and Santayana, if we scan the  CV only, seems to have duly drank at this spring. He was the student of William James, after all, and during his heyday in the twenties and thirties, he played Atreus to Dewey’s Thyestes, or, more exactly, Dupin to Dewey’s Minister D… Dewey, in Santayana’s opinion, was too heady, too fumbling, and above all too liberal. Santayana, in Dewey’s opinion,  was too clever by half and too inclined to worship an order that gave him every privilege – a rentier philosopher.

The too clever reputation has stuck. Open Santayana and it is easy to see why. When we read Skepticism and Animal Faith, the first thing we are struck by is that, if he absorbed James’s pragmatism, he imbibed it with a writing style much more like James’s brother’s, Henry. And this stylistic choice was not an accident, but a methodological choice. Santayana thought that philosophy was not really best advanced, or, as he might put it,best  performed by  debate; the impress of this conviction lies behind a style unlike almost any other in American philosophy, presenting philosophical views that are less arguments than a sort of uncovering of ideational motives corresponding to the characteristics of philosophical figures (the skeptic, the Platonist, the naturalist, etc.)  in much the way James’s characters, in the latter novels, approach by indirection the betrayals that they are, to their retrospective horror, all too capable of.

In this vein, Santayana’s Skepticism and Animal Faith is one of the great frustrating books, advancing its themes less as deductions than as a sort of striptease in which the philosophical figures cavort on a stage to an audience of bloodless angels. Santayana, too, has that American philosophical allergy to the “myth of the given” , but his way of doing philosophy, after fully accounting for the insufficiency of the given to really account for any of the ‘facts’ of the world, is to take a tremendous detour back to a curious defense of essences. Santayana’s sense of essence has been radically converted by the skeptic’s questioning to one that has only a distant kinship with  essence as it appears in traditional theology, morality and cosmology. Plato, in one of his dialogues, asks whether it could be possible for such things as dirt and hair to have a correspondence in the ideas, and decides that they couldn’t – they are all too existentially connected to becoming. Santayana ignores this famous Platonic division and cheerfully welcomes dirt and hair and all other things into the realm of essence. For Santayana, essences are to the world what a book catalogue would be to Borges’s Library of Babel – “It [the realm of essence] is simply the unwritten catalgue, prosaic and infinite, of all the characters possessed by such things as happen to exist, together with the characters which all different things would possess if they existed.”

Santayana argues this position at more length than I am prepared to go in his three volume opus on the Realms of Being. One can allow the practicing philosopher to take up those tomes; Scepticism and Animal Faith, on the contrary, can be picked up by the merely curious reader, because, while it does not stint on technicalities, it is not enchained by them. It contains marvelous extended scenarios, some of the best in the philosophical literature. For instance, here is Santayana, doing justice to the solipsist’s position and putting it back into what he feels to be its natural position:

So far is solipsism of the present moment from being self-contradictory that it might, under other circumstances, be the normal and invincible attitude of the spirit; and I suspect it may be that of many animals. The difficulties I find in maintaining it consistently come from the social and laborious character of human life. A creature whose whole existence was passed under a hard shell, or was spent in a free flight, might find nothing paradoxical or acrobatic in solipsism; nor whouold he feel the anguish which men feel in doubt, because doubt leaves them defenceless and undecided in the presence of on-coming events. A creature whose actions were predetermined might have a clearer mind. He might keenly enjoy the momentary scene, never conceiving of himself as a separate body or as anything but the unity of that scene, nor his enjoyment as anything but its beauty: nor would he harbour the least suspicion that it would change or perish, nor any objection to its doing so if it chose. Solipsism wouod then be selflessness and scepticism simplicity. They would not be open to disruption from within. The ephemeral insect would accept the evidence of his ephemeral object, whatevver quality this might chance to have; he would not suppose, as Descartes did, that in thinking anything his own existence was involved. Being new-born himself, with only this one innate (and also experimental) idea, he would brign to his single experience no extraneous habits of interpretation or inference; and he would not be troubled by doubts, because he would believe nothing.”

This is magnificent, and even, given the ethology of the time, plausible. The standard of intelligence by which philosophers and their henchmen, the journalists or popular science writers, still judge animals is, comparatively, retarded. Intelligence is never judged for the animal – there is no novelistic transposition into what it is “like” to be such and such a beast. Of course, that novelistic leap is all too human, and the solipsism of the fly, such as it is described by Santayana, strikes me as strangely akin to that of the Wall Street stockbroker, of whose kind Santayana knew a few.

The price to be paid for Santayana’s kind of philosophy (a kind in which style is as intrinsic as the carapace is to a beetle) is not entrapment in an infinitity of technical questions of diminishing resonance (the fate of analytic philosophy), but a cold bloodedness that is all too freezing for my taste. Santayana was a very closeted gay man, who ended his life living as a tenant in a nunnery in Rome. His affections were always, so far as I can gather from the letters, frost-bitten. In SAF, this disposition is always just beneath the surface:

 “I myself have no passionate attachment to existence, and value this world for the intuitions it can suggest, rather than for the wilderness of facts that compose it. To turn away from it may be the deepest wisdom in the end. What better than to blow out the candle, and to bed! But at noon this pleasure is premature. I can always hold it in reserve, and perhaps nihilism is a system – the simplest of all – on which we shall all agree in the end.”

This accomodates our final end a bit too richly. It reminds us of the fascist slogan: viva la muerte!

This is perhaps no accident. Santayana’s politics was always inclined to fascism. In 1931, surveying the problematic modern scene (which he took in a wholly sub species aeternitas fashion – the Great Depression was a matter for intermittent notice in the letters, where he made the usual rentier complaints against FDR), he wrote that one of the great problems among the “Western” countries was:

… an inherited form of government, by organized parties

and elections, which was based on revolutionary

maxims, and has become irrelevant to the true work

of the modern world if not disastrous for it.

In 1951, a year before his death, he corresponded with Corliss Lamont, who wanted to enlist him as a “humanist”. In the course of so doing, Lamont defended Santayana from the charge of fascism. Santayana gently disabused him, writing that,, on the contrary,  he welcomed Mussolini (Santayana had been living in Italy by this time for around thirty years) and Franco, even if he agreed that Mussolini, at least, was a bad man. He at least, to paraphrase Santayana’s defense, made the trains run on time.   

Like other of the great modernists, Santayana’s authoritarian streak arose from a cancerous nostalgia for something other than modernity. Unlike Pound or Lewis or Eliot, though, Santayana fully accepted the nihilism that gnawed at the very core of the existentialist project. He’s perpetually the philosophical loner, which I accept as a genuine posture of thought. In that spirit, Skepticism and Animal Faith is a loner’s masterpiece.