the point outside the painting

LI is like ‘poor Atabalipa’, the Inca emperor. When we open a book, we want to hear voices: hints, whispers, cries, the banjo opera, and every sigh, and every sudden silence. We want something to arise from the pages.

So, when we began this series of posts about 17th century figures, some of whom – Mothe de la Vayer, for instance – might not be today’s headliners, we went looking to one of our long time favorite books, Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, thinking that our theme – the failure of an ethos of volupté to move from the hypocognizable to the hypercognized – or, in plain English, the failure of a lifestyle oriented around volupté to accrue a fully ethical standing under capitalism – could settle, so to speak, within that text, find a niche there. Roberto Calasso, in The Ruins of Kasch, alludes to a marvelous word – intersigne – to refer to coincidences in the social world. Out of such coincidences, the paranoid weaves his dreams. Gravity’s Rainbow is, for instance, premised on the mad pursuit of intersigne. Well, LI originally thought that there was an intersigne between what we are doing and what Foucault did.

So far, however, this hasn’t proved to be the case.

In Les Mots et les Choses, one of Foucault’s games was to show how one could talk about “dominant ideas” within dominant forms of governance without using Marx’s notion of ideology. And, of course, Foucault’s notion of dominant ideas are ideas that explain, classify, describe – in a word, these ideas form an epistemological apparatus. In the famous preface, Foucault makes the tentative claim that the Classical era’s epistemological center is all in the play of representation. In the introduction, that long, lingering close up of Velasquez’s painting, Las Meninas, Foucault finds an objective correlate to make his point:

This center is symbolically sovereign in the anecdote, since it is occupied by King Philip IV and his wife. But principally, he is it by the triple function that he occupies in relation to the painting (tableau). In him there comes to be superposed exactly the gaze of the model in the moment in which he is painted, that of the spectator who contemplates the scene, and that of the painter at the moment he composes his tableau (not he who is represented, but he who is before us and of whom we speak). These three “looking” functions are confounded in a point exterior to the tableau – that is to say, ideal by relationship to what is represented, but perfectly real insofar as it is by way of it that representation becomes possible. And yet, this reality is projected into the interior of the tableau, projected and diffracted in three figures who correspond to the three functions of this ideal and real point. These are: to the left the painter with his palette in his hand (selfportrait of the author of the tableau); to the right the visitor, a foot on the step, ready to enter into the setting (la pièce); he takes in all the scene in reverse, but sees the front of the royal couple, which is the spectacle itself; at the center at last, the reflection of the king and the queen, decked out, immobile, in the attitude of patient models.”

Foucault has marvelously followed the arrow of sight, here, to diagram the intersection between power and knowledge – and the first stage of knowing is seeing, even though – the logic here is gone over and over again by Nagarjuna – one can’t see the seeing. But as we reduce the painting to relations between audience, painter, and the royal couple, we allow the ‘subject” here to become the total product of these gazes. Yet of course they aren’t. Foucault is evidently avoiding the attitudes implied by the Marxist formula that the dominant ideas of an epoque are the expression of the dominant class. Yet he has not emerged from the spell of that formula altogether. The paintings real structure, in terms of whose gaze counts, subtly excludes certain of the court retinue - namely, the dwarves, who take up as much facial space in this painting as anyone else. Of course, they are intruders on the royal scene – and yet they still exist within it, expressing another exteriority that isn’t counted by the gaze. The mechanism of hierarchy that is presumed here has, after all, to perform two functions, one of which is separation, and the other of which is connection - for the court could not exist for a second without its multitudinous contacts with the classes below it. These dwarves have wandered out of the enclosures that Foucault has so expertly described in Histoire de la Folie dans l’Age classique. Is it by accident that Foucault chose this painting to linger upon? Yet, the culminating point of the lesson of Las Meninas, for Foucault, brackets them. This makes me wonder if there is room in Les Mots et les Choses for the adventure and its social importance, as I am conceiving it. For, in other words, the traversing of social spaces. Surely those dwarves are intersignes: erudite and popular culture are separated by a gesture of erudite culture, and that gesture has generally been believed - but shouldn't one ask whether erudite culture can really judge itself that well? And whether its audience - which is erudite culture as well - is not just as prejudiced, or blind? In terms of emotional customs: is it true that mapping the epistemological machinery of a social space and time gives us the fundamental determinant of that space’s passional customs? Is it true that the epistemological machinery, during this era, successfully purges itself of rites de passage, substituting for it autonomous scientific methods, among which, Foucault claims, is pre-eminently, in the early modern period, the method of representation?

I think he noticed the gap between the life order of the passions and the epistemological machines himself, which is why, at the end of his life, he turned to the disciplines of the self.

But still – LI will not underestimate the possibilities that rise out of Foucault’s book.

a cunicular affair

Hannah Hoech - Denkmal 1

I am the passenger...

And now, the act you have all been waiting for, ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Victor Turner!

(A friend of LI’s once described going to a whorehouse in Nueva Laredo when he was a teen and watching a magic act, which consisted of an indifferent magician piercing himself and his assistant with a big needle, then making objects disappear, while the M.C. kept up a deadly chorus of applauso, applauso, applauso in an effort to rouse up the drunk Texas fratboys sitting at the tables, mulling over their choices of fuck. Sometimes, that image comes over LI as we think of this blog.)

I want to pull out a few of Turner’s concepts to make clearer what I mean by the adventurous turn.

In some famous papers in the sixties and seventies, Turner (who worked with his wife, Edith) constructed an elaborate anthropological theory around Arnold van Gennep’s notion of rites de passage. This is from the paper, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors:

“He [Arnold van Gennep] showed us that all rites de passages (rites of transition) are marked by three phases: separation, limen or margin, and aggregation. The first phase comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group, either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from a relatively stable set of cultural conditions (a cultural “state”); during the intervening liminal phase, the state of the ritual subject ( the “passenger” or “liminar”) becomes ambiguous, he passes through a dimension that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state, he is betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification; in the third phase the passage is consummated, and the subject returns to classified secular or mundane social life. The ritual subject, individual or corporate (groups, age-sets, and social categories can also undergo transition), is again in a stable state, has rights and obligations of a clearly defined structural type.” – Victor and Edith Turner.

The passenger is an adventurer. As I’ve pointed out, there are various ways of sitting still. Newton’s is one way – it is a stillness filled with waiting. Some of the libertine writers sat in another way – they were attached to various of the great houses. And then there was the circle that formed around Theophile de Viau, and, in the 1650s – after his death – still kept the memory of the esprit fort alive. Among those esprits forts were Theophile’s lovers, Chapelle and des Barreaux – who were friends of Moliere. Cyrano de Bergerac was also part of this group. The figure of Don Juan was extracted by Moliere from this group. He, too, is a passenger, but his form of sitting still was to engage in an eternally obsessive hunt that took him over the same trajectory again and again. He moved, but his movement returns him to the beginning. This is the significance of continually being on the threshhold of marriage - not simply looking for the next fuck. Don Juan is a marrying man, as Sganarelle says, who wants to marry the whole world - except that he never wants to go through the entire ceremony. He wants to eternally return from the point at which he is pledged to marry to the point at which he hunts for another woman to marry. This space, in terms of age, is youth. It is youth as the artificial paradise. As Kierkegaard points out, his desire is infinite, but it is an infinity of made up of repetitions of the same trajectory.

The adventure, that space ‘betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification’, became the modality through which hierarchized social structures could be experienced – moved through. The libertine ethos and adventure have an elective affinity one with the other. Remember that it is in two things that the libertine stands out: his absolute modernity, and, through that, his perception of nature. By being modern, one understands nature beyond any schema that involves the marvelous. What one understands is that nature is the collective effect of constant motion. One’s own nature is, in this schema, definitely part of the whole. It is here that passion plays a signal role, for passion arises as a form of pure motion within the self. It comes from the bottom up, so to speak. The adventurer as a passenger not only passes through landscapes and social strata, but he passes through passions. The libertine notion of character is subtly different than the classical notion insofar as the classical notion searches for an organic principle – self love – which gives rise to various molds of character, whereas the libertine conceives of character as something hardening at the extreme of the self. The libertine character is hectic – it retains the mark of the inconsistency and contradictions of the struggle of passions one with the other.

There is another aspect of the adventurer that can be brought out in Turner’s terms. Turner wrote that it might be more accurate to think of the limen – the middle period – in terms of the tunnel – the cunicula. We’ve been trying to connect the world of reading – the rise of the third life – to adventure, using Don Quixote as the connecting and symbolic figure. The tunnel is a very precise symbol of the reading experience. To read does create a tunnel – a cunicular space – between the page and the reader. The reader is in two places in that tunnel – at the one end, as the physical agent doing the reading, but – in his or her imagination – in the middle. Don Quixote issued out of that tunnel at the beginning of the period in which he would normally be settling into the habits of old age.

Seducer/victim

... que tu vois en Dom Juan, mon maître, le plus grand scélérat que la
terre ait jamais porté, un enragé, un chien, un diable, un Turc, un hérétique, qui ne croit ni Ciel, ni Enfer, ni loup−garou

According to his biographer, Alistair Hannay, Kierkegaard first attended a performance of Don Giovanni when he was 22. It was the same period in which, according to his journal, he was deeply interested in the Faust myth.

Hannay quotes a journal entry from Kierkegaard four years after having seen (and reseen – he went back repeatedly) – Mozart’s opera:

In some ways I can say of Don Giovanni what Elvira says to the hero: “You murderer of my happiness’ –
For to tell the truth, it is this piece which has affected me so diabolically that I can never forget it; it was this piece which drove me like Elvira out of the quiet night of the cloister.

Much latter, in Berlin, when Kierkegaard went to a performance of Don Giovanni, he compared the singer of Elvira to “a certain young woman” – Regina, that Beatrice among the jilted.

Kierkegaard found Moliere’s Don Juan ... unsatisfactory. He was not the medieval knight endowed with the erotic sensibility of Kierkegaard's imagination. Remember that Kierkegaard’s view of the Middle Ages comes directly from the Romantic writers. Spain in the sixteenth century was a Grimm's fairy tale place, or a place where the Grand Inquisitor roamed. Of course, really, Spain was the country most open to the rest of the world – Africa, Asia and America - in the sixteenth century. It was in Spain that the adventurer found his epoch making social embodiment – in the conquest of the New World.

But putting this aside - we’d like to linger a bit on the question of why Kierkegaard would say that Don Giovanni – the opera – had murdered his happiness, the way Don Giovanni – the character – had murdered Elvira’s.

A couple of notes before we look at the section on Don Giovanni in Either/Or. First, the identifications here. Kierkegaard is like Dona Elvira in his first notes about the opera. Then Regine Olson is like Dona Elvira when he sees the opera in Berlin. That would tacitly put Kierkegaard in Don Giovanni’s place, as the seducer. But Regine’s happiness was not, it seemed, murdered in that seduction – she remarried.

Is the murder of happiness the goal of the seducer or an accidental byproduct? Kierkegaard was sometimes unhappy that Regine’s remarriage showed that she wasn’t unhappy. At least on the level of sadism, there is a strong connection between Moliere’s and Mozart’s Don Juan. Don Juan is aroused by Dona Elvira’s tears. To want someone to be unhappy might, however, simply be the sign that one wants someone’s happiness – the seduced, the victim – to depend on oneself – as the seducer. In this way, the exchange of recognitions is different from that of the Master-Slave relationship, where recognition – but not happiness – is the dominant term in the dialectic. If happiness enters as an issue in the Master-Slave relationship, if fundamentally alters it. But there is another relationship that might explain the murder of happiness. It might be that the seducer reveals something to the victim that strikes at her fundamental ability to be happy.

Enough. I had no sleep last night, and must write a grandiose review tomorrow. I'm weepin on my own grave - or at least jerking off over it. More in another post.

(ps - I should say - in terms of stage performance, Moliere's Don Juan has long been under Kierkegaard's thumb. Since Louis Jouvet revived Dom Juan, a not often performed play, in 1947, the play has returned to the canon, but not as a comedy. Notice, in the tv version I linked to, the ... the un-harlequin-ness of Sganarelle. This is not the comic figure who Moliere played - there isn't a laugh in the speech with Gusman. The laughs in it - for instance, Sganarelle falling down a sand dune - are neo-realist laughs, laughs from the pain of real life. Hmm, I don't know what Moliere would have made of it all. But Moliere was, after all, an actor, and knew all about changing the directions in a play, the tendency of it, the pronunciation of it).

Addition Tuesday night:

Kierkegaard’s Don Juan is seduced, himself, by his desire. The rush of that desire is primarily musical. Don Juan is no slyboots, no fast talker, no layer in wait. Time, for him, breaks in two: before the moment of supreme sensuality and after the moment.

Of course, Kierkegaard knows there are other Don Juans – he quotes Achim von Arnim’s remark that the devil had to be careful taking Don Juan to hell, because his verbal skill with women was such that if he met the devil’s grandmother, he’d talk himself out of the place. But this is not Don Juan as Kierkegaard sees him in Mozart’s opera.

Yet if he is no talker, he is still a hunter – he is still after women as prey:

“Thus Don Juan desires the whole of the female sex in every woman; and herein lies the sensual idealizing power, with which he at the same time beautifies his prey, as he makes her submit. The reflection of this gigantic passion softens and transforms the object of his desire: she blushes in the intensified beauty of her mirror image, there. In so far as the fire of some desired object illuminates with its seductive glow even objects standing far off from it, if it only stands in some relationship to them, so does he transfigure in a far deeper sense every girl when his relation. Thus all differences vanish for him in comparison with the one thing that is the main thing: that he has a woman before him. He makes the aged younger, bringing them back to the very center of their feminity; near children he ripens in the bud; everything feminine counts as prey to him.“

This poses a construction problem for the Don Juan epic, for it has the potential to go on as long as there are women to seduce - it has no natural bound. For Kierkegaard, the solution to that problem – that aesthetic problem – is musical. Don Juan fallen into the mere particulars of speech is a man with a mania like other men – a mania for money for some, a mania for health for others – in fact, the manias that make up Moliere’s Theophrastian comedies. But Don Juan as a musical sensualist transcends the problem of the particular – in Kierkegaard’s opinion.

This is one of the motives Kierkegaard gives for dismissing Moliere’s play.

Don Juan, Newton's secret sharer

Despite its adherence to the rather old fashioned notion that the history of ideas is concerned solely with the development of philosophical arguments, Schlomo Biderman’s project in Crossing Horizons, to contrast “Indian” thought and “Western” thought, is suggestive. One of the things it suggests it does not examine: how is it that idealism arrived so late in Europe? As a coherent, consistent doctrine, that is, not as a mystical hint?

In the three stories post, I meant to set up a rough edged answer to that problem. It is an answer that involves ‘adventure’. In the pre-capitalist, post-conquest society of the seventeenth century – in which a fully functioning global economic and political system exists, but lacking an industrial base – adventure is a symbol of social mobility. It is under the sign of adventure that social mobility happens. The adventure narrative and the adventurer penetrate inwards, as it were, from the margins. Print culture, at the same time, is the necessary condition not only for the spread of the adventure tale, but as the producer of that material which allows adventure to become a locus for new practices of imitatio.

In the relationship between Don Quixote and the mysterious Cide Hamete, the author of Don Quixote – or the ‘discoverer’ of Don Quixote (since he claims, or one of the characters in his story claims, that he ‘discovers’ books, which is surprising in the way that Columbus’s discovery of America is surprising – how can one man discover another man?) we have, in outline, the kind of ontological relationship that Descartes, later on, imagines with the problem of the evil demon. And if that demon were not evil, if, indeed, it were God, and if all our sensory impressions are as ambiguous as discoveries – sense impressions that are followed, only and inevitably, by sense impressions, as far back as we can go, just as discoveries follow discoveries on some Terra Incognita – then we approach the precincts of the idea that the Irish clergyman, George Berkeley, unfolds in The Principles of Human Knowledge.

Where, in this hasty sketch, is Newton?

Newton, drawing his symbols in new gravel in Cambridge walks. A man who writes, but doesn’t send, one personal letter in thirty years, and this in the age of personal letters, when the society of scholars was as much bound together by their gossipy correspondence as by their discoveries. Newton, utterly incapable of explaining his thoughts to an amiable princess, the way Descartes explained his in his letters to the Princess Elisabeth of Palatine. Newton, who stayed put.
To stay put was one way to advance – if you were Newton. He disappears into his study, his books – whereas Don Quixote pops out of his. Both have an adventurous view of their missions. Don Quixote literally wouldn’t have existed without the book culture, and Newton ... well, it is hard to say what he would have done. Become a village visionary?

There is another story of a book. It is in Mothe de la Vayer’s Discourse on History. Mothe de la Vayer takes up a story from Sandoval, the historian who recounted the conquest of Peru, to critique, in his own way, the geopolitics of the book:

He is at such pains to justify the right of the Spaniards and to exalt their prowess that it is perhaps one of the most farcical pieces [like a theater piece – a sketch] that is seen in any history. As to the right, unless one is very austere, it is hard to keep from laughing seeing the beautiful harangue that he puts in the mouth of one Valverde, a Dominican bishop, in order to persuade poor Atabalipa to cede his kingdom to the newcomers. He talks to him, in two words, about the trinity, the incarnation of the Word, of the passion of the son of God, and of what is the most mysterious in our religion, in order to come to the point at which the Pope, the lieutenant of this God on earth, had made a present to the Emperor, their master, of all Peru, and thus that he had to quit his present estate and become a Christian. Atabalipa responded that he held his kingdom from his predecessors, that he recognized no superior on earth, and that the Pope of whom they were speaking must be a crazy man, devia de ser loco, to give what doesn’t belong to him; and that he was not resolved to quit his religion, which seemed good to him, for another, nor to worship a dead god, in place of the sun, which never dies. On which Valverde presented him with his breviary, assuring him that this book taught the truth of everything he had been saying. Atabalipa took it, not ever having seen anything like it, and as he saw that the book didn’t speak, he believed he was being mocked, and threw it to the ground. There was no need for anything else: the Bishop cried out reveng to the Spaniards who were only waiting for the signal, they put their boot in, killed without resistance all the Indians found there, and Pizarro made the great Monarch a prisoner of his hand. Sandoval thinks the actions was so beautiful that in this place he reports the words of the Dominican, Los Evangelios por tierra Christianos, justicia de Dios, vengaca, Christianos vengaca, a ellos, que menosprpecian, y no quieren recebir nuestra ley, ny ser nuestros amigos. I recognize that the reply of Atabalipa is full of impiety towards our God, our religion, and the visible head of the Church. But what else could one expect of a poor Gentile, unequipped with divine grace, who spoke only according to his common sense [sens naturel], and who had never heard of the propositions of the Evangelist, than at the very instant when, in pronouncing them, they held a knife to his throat?”

I’ve been trying to make a case for the libertines, based on my perception of that fragile, half complete structure of sensibility – volupte – that they never succeeded in making either coherent or popular. And of the libertines themselves, after Theophile’s imprisonment, one sees a retraction – and a search for shelter. Shelter they found in the households of the great – Naudé working for Mazarin, Saint Amant becoming the panagyrist of the Cardinal de Retz, Mothe de la Vayer working as the court historiographer under Louis XIV. They, too, didn’t move, but their stillness was not pregnant, as Newton’s was, with adventure. They were office holders, useful men, off hours skeptics.

Adventure found the libertines only in fiction. In Don Juan. In Cyrano de Bergerac’s act, who was to trace a path the inverse of Don Quixote’s – instead of a fictional character becoming independent of an author, the author became a fictional character, and fixed himself in the mind of posterity as such.

a reckoning

Bubble bubble toil and trouble.
Let’s do a small reckoning, shall we?
Let's reckon up outlay in one column, and cosmic stupidity in the other column.
In the one column, we have a government outlay of 164 billion dollars. Was this money spent on a crash industrial program to develop better, fuel efficient or fuel alternative technologies? Did we decide to use the power of research represented by the public financing of education, the vast array of state universities, to create and then license said technology? Or did we decide that the credit card companies needed some bloodsugar?
Ah, what are the markers of cosmic stupidity? We need a lot of them to put in the other column. So many! All festooning our low, dirty, dishonest and lobotomized time.

Then, we have the Fed making loans to the financial sector for some as yet indefinite amount – perhaps as much as 400 billion. With the financial sector awash in cash, of course, money went zipping over to where return on non-investment would do the most good – commodities! And so we said hello to various mysterious spikes in oil prices.

Cosmic stupidity, and ramping up the carbon based suicide of the planet. Excellent. The cosmic stupidity spirits are surely rubbing their hands with glee.

And then, of course, we have Wall Street dinosaurs, who can’t remember the last time they actually had to pay for a meal, or their taxes, or any service whatsoever, deciding that this was the best of times – as indeed people do decide when they are loaned money at below par rates. Of course, much of the financial sector now consists of complicated bets on shifts in equities and commodities markets, so in essence, the Fed – never as smart as Br’er Rabbit – was taking collateral that will plummet in value if the stock market plummets in value. This massive bet on the market going up, and the market going up because the Fed was making the massive bet, seemed an excellent thing, so excellent that the fact that the economy depends on the consumption of all those people who’d maxed out their credit cards and weren’t getting wage increases seemed petty to even contemplate. Surely we were going to continue on course as we sailed through another episode of the great moderation – which is what the servitors of the wealthy, the economists, call our present phase of exacerbating wealth inequality, cutting public investment, and relying on the power that lies in consumer debt, linked to asset inflation.

To explain how Wall Street thinks, the best source, at the moment, is Jezbel.

“Oh. My. God. Okay: Henry T. Nicholas III is the former CEO of Broadcom. Broadcom makes chips that run your cable boxes and cell phones and modems and crap, but that is so beside the point here. (Well, there is this theory that porn drives all communications and media innovation, but let's cut to the chase.) In the midst of investigating Broadcom on a run-of-the-mill options backdating scandal, the Feds learned something interesting about how Henry T. Nicholas III would close a deal with a cable box manufacturer or a modem maker or whatever: he'd slip drugs into their drinks. Generally Ecstasy. Sometimes meth or coke. No seriously. The indictment is here. He'd do this, among other places, at concerts, the Super Bowl, Rome, and in an underground room and tunnel he'd built under his Rodeo Drive apartment. Seriously, check it out.”

Ah, the successful.

And this is from the NYT story: “Shares [of Broadcom] rose 65 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $28.75 on Thursday, amid a general upswing in the stock market. Its 52-week trading range was between $16.38 and $43.07.”

When you're alone like he was alone...

I’ve got the abattoir blues...
Three stories.

Story 1:

In Book 2, Chapter 4 of Don Quixote, the knight is being chatted up by a local wit, a student named Samson. Samson wants to have some fun at Don Quixote’s expense, and thus we know that we can put him under the category of an insiders. The bystanders, in Don Quixote, are either insiders or outsiders, with the insiders being in on the joke of the knight's madness, which often prompts them to some practical joke, while the outsiders react, often with some indignation, to his words and acts as though they spoken and enacted on the same plane of reality as anybody else's words and acts. It isn’t entirely clear what stance we, as readers, are to take to the insiders. They represent us, as readers, and yet their mockery doesn’t quite match our own mixed feelings. And, indeed, are they really in on the joke, especially in Book 2? Aren't they themselves the prey of a certain ontological trap? Samson has been telling Don Quixote and Sancho Panza about the book, Don Quixote, written by a Moor. The pair are not aware that they are in a book, and are naturally interested in this fact. Samson tells them that the author has promised, at the end of Book 1, to find the 2nd book in which their adventures continue:

“And what does the author mean to do?" said Don Quixote.

"What?" replied Samson; "why, as soon as he has found the history
which he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at
once give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to
him from doing so than by any thought of praise."

Whereat Sancho observed, "The author looks for money and profit,
does he? It will he a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only
hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works
done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.
Let master Moor, or whatever he is, pay attention to what he is doing,
and I and my master will give him as much grouting ready to his
hand, in the way of adventures and accidents of all sorts, as would
make up not only one second part, but a hundred. The good man fancies,
no doubt, that we are fast asleep in the straw here, but let him
hold up our feet to be shod and he will see which foot it is we go
lame on. All I say is, that if my master would take my advice, we
would be now afield, redressing outrages and righting wrongs, as is
the use and custom of good knights-errant."

There is a three irreal steps here. The characters in a book want to know what the author of the book wrote about them, thus putting their wonder in a space outside of the book. The author of the book ends the book by promising to find the book in which the characters’ adventures are completed – and by this the author negates himself as an author, insofar as he seeks a book that is already completed, a book in which the characters continue their adventures. And finally, as the author is fancying what the characters are doing – no doubt thinking the characters are “fast asleep in the straw, here” – the characters are about to move on to new adventures, which may either mean the adventures in the book the self-annihilating author is seeking or the book that the author is contemplating writing.

Story 2

Schlomo Biderman, in Crossing Horizons: the World, Self and Language in Indian and Western Thought (a book LI, under the name Roger Gathman, will be reviewing for the Austin Statesman, ‘moved more by the profit that may accrue to him from doing so than by any thought of praise’), devotes one chapter to the No-Self, contrasting Kafka and the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna’s book, Mulamadhyamakakarika, is dedicated to the proposition that propositions don’t reference any extra-linguistic reality. Nor, according to Nagarjuna, do they reference any inter-linguistic reality. In fact, what we call reality is, upon examination, emptiness.

“A courageous philosopher might rise up and say: since the signpost pointing us to emptiness is itself empty, why need I pay heed to its warning? However, such reaction will not betray great wisdom; it will only reveal a sorrowful myopia, an inability to distinguish properly between claims that try to assert something as opposed to preventive performatives, like those of Nagarjuna. Nargajuna himself clearly emphasizes the peventive-performative function of his claims, likening them to the action of an imaginary person perventing someone from doing something. An imaginary woman, for example, is voeted by a man who mistakenly thinks that she is a flesh and blood woman. Then a doctor arrives and draws the man’s attention to his error, to the fact that he should not have set out on his lustful path in the first place since the object of his desire is but a product of his imagination. Dispensing a course of preventive therapy, the doctor successfully cures the deluded man; he prevents the desperate lover from erring, revealing the illurory nature of the woman he covets. At this point, Nagarjuna surprises us: the doctor preventing the illusion is himself illusory – he too is imagined. Would this illusory doctor fail to cure this man just because he himself is a fictional character? (218)

Story three

- In Richard Westfall’s biography of Isaac Newton, he marvels over the paucity of references to Newton in reminiscences of his fellow Cambridge University worthies. There are a handful of stories. They are all about Newton’s famed “absent mindedness” – or what Nagajuna might have recognized as mindedness of absence. And a nexus between the book and madness that Don Quixote’s friends might well recognize, as well. According to William Stukeley:

“As when he has been in the hall at dinner, he has quite neglected to help himslef and the cloth has been taken away before he has eaten anything. That sometime, when on surplice days, he would goe toward S. Mary’s church, instead of college chapel, or perhaps has gone in his surplice to dinner in the hall. That when he had friends to entertain at his chamber, if he stept in to his study for a bottle of wine, and a thought came into his head, he would sit down to paper and forget his friends.”

- His friends. Stukeley implies that he had friends. Westfall found, in Newton’s entire correspondence, only one personal letter in the entire corpus. It was written to Francis Aston, who was going abroad, to Europe, and consisted of advice about what to see and do abroad, copied almost literally from a manuscript by Robert Southwell. Newton had never been abroad. He adds that he would like it if Aston could find a book for him by Michael Maier on astrology. Westfall writes that the letter is “more ludicrous than eloquent.” “It is found today among Newton’s own papers, which suggests that he recognized he was cutting a ridiculous figure as he assumed a ridiculous posture on the basis of one month in London and an essay by Southwell, and decided not to send it.”

- When Newton walked in the fellow’s garden, according to another reminiscence, “if some new gravel happen’d to be laid on the walks, it was sure to be drawn over and over with a bit of stick, in Sir Isaac’s diagrams; which the Fellows would cautiously spare by walking beside them, and there they would sometime remain for a good while.’

- His servant, Humphrey Newton – no relation – when Newton went to give the lectures he was obliged to give “so few went to see him, and fewer that understood him, that oftimes he did in a manner, for want of Hearers, read to the walls.”

Everything has been done

Dead disco, dead punk, dead rock n roll

Code Poetix tagged us to list seven songs we are listening to for the spring. Well, usually LI just don’t do the meme thingy, for the same reason that, in the first grade, we had such trouble learning the hokey pokey – an exaggerated sense of our own ridiculousness in certain social situations. But this seems like fun. And a good link excuse!

1. Ysa Ferrer’s To bi or not to bi Throughout her career, Ysa has shown a strong desire to dress in sexy costumes and be physically lofted by lithe but muscular men. Well, don’t we all? In the plus column, too, there is her often expressed desire to literally become a Manga character. I am pretty confident that to bi or not to bi will be in the clubs this summer, although perhaps more the clubs in Moscow than NYC.
2. Britney Spears Piece of Me. The news that Britney Spears is “not fit” to take over her estate – which, of course, I read via my handy Google Britney Spears news alert – makes me wonder whether Brit isn’t playing some deep game, here, mimicking a conformity that, in her heart, she surely doesn’t feel. The old Britney would certainly have run off with her beach chair beau without a thought in the world, but the new one has to make her way through a Machiavellian forest of other people’s strategies – much like Beatrice Cenci.
O white innocence,
That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide
Thine awful and serenest countenance
From those who know thee not!
3. Santogold L.E.S. artistes. LI is not going to lie. We are in love, painfully, humiliatingly in love with Santi White. The whole gestalt, lock stock and barrel, from her carefully chosen look – the great psychodelic designs of her pants, the dyed, unequally cut hair, those beautiful hands - to the impassive flygirls, some retroreference to a mashup between the Soul on Ice universe and Barbarella. There is no song we don’t like.
4. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Deanna. LI would have to fold up if we didn’t have Nick Cave to accompany our frequent jags of pointlessness. And then, there’s this song, the title of which coincides with a certain current crush. About which, LI will not be jinxing the issue by many more personal revelations on this blog. You make personal revelations, you live to regret them.
5. Dhoom Machele by Tata Young. Everybody loves Bollywood line dancing. LI does too! Just try to resist it.
6. Weepers Circus Ma dame aux camellias. Têtes raides is having an excellent influence on French music at the moment. There’s a return to a sound that evokes the Moroccan decored boite de nuit in Hollywood, 1937, backed by a wastrel old Goa to Katmandu 60s rock beat. It is cool to me that this is the opposite of Ysa Ferrer’s sound, and yet both are so cabaret.

At the end of this exercise, I am supposed to tag others. Well, I would love to hear the summer music lists of my web compañeros: the WerePoet, Northhanger, Chabert, Mr. Praxis, Amie, Mr. Lumpenprofessoriat. Among others.

Na na na na na na na na na na na na

Death of a Lady's man

“I always served women and I did it without compromise until the end, with respect and love.” - Yves St. Laurent.


LI – who has advised our readers, last week, to spend their hard earned dough on Isabel Marant fall ensembles - was contemplating writing an obit post about Saint Laurent yesterday. Well, we didn’t. Instead, we watched Louis Malle’s Feu Follet (rather bizarrely translated as The Fire Inside), which by coincidence was about the cultural mix of the era in which Saint Laurent first rose to prominence at Dior.

Malle directed four films that, between them, constitute a physiognomy of the French right – Au revoir les enfant, Souffle au Coeur, Lacombe, Lucien and Feu Follet. World war ii, Indochina, Algeria – betrayal, incest, suicide. Politics, here, is a sickness arising from the very heart of the bourgeoisie’s Lebensordnung. The sixties was the moment that changed – affluence significantly eroded the old triangle of Country, Work, Home, and a significant portion of the children of the bourgeoisie went left.

It was the lot of the fascist intellectual to travel, by the most destructive of possible paths, to a moment of absolute self condemnation. Hitler’s suicide was a template for all of them. Wyndham Lewis, that master of titles, entitled his post WWII novel Self-condemned for good reason. Feu Follet is based on Drieu la Rochelle’s novel, written in the twenties, when Drieu was still involved with the avant garde. But it resonates, of course, with Drieu La Rochelle’s career, capped by the heady collaboration with the Nazis, and his own suicide in the farce of Sigmaringen (which Celine has written about) in 1945.

Malle had an uncanny sense of exactly how the right works as a circle – as a social milieu. The conjunction of a language straight out of Flaubert’s dictionnaire des idees recues, the assumption that tools can easily be bought to destroy any personal problem, which is at the origin of the louche bullying style that can crop up anywhere, and the amazing charm – oh, the charm of these people, especially the women. Beauty, manners, an air of complete intention. The film keeps Maurice Ronet, the actor who plays the lead here, an alcoholic man about town, Alain Leroy, at the center or on the edge of most of the shots. He’s a beautiful man to look at – this film really does convey what it means to be a lady’s man. The only comparable American film on the subject is Shampoo. It is a rich subject. LI has known one real lady’s man in our life – a man who lived to seduce women, who devoted himself to the rituals, the micro-sadisms, the being thrown out of apartments, the need to revenge every fuck, the uncanny ability to zero in on, to situate himself in, a woman’s narcissism and operate from that point onward. It is a series of campaigns. Leroy is an ex military man, out of Algeria, in Malle’s film, a friend of the far right paramilitaries who came out of that war. He is going down, his campaigns have all brought him to naught. Yet even as he goes down he excites the sidelong glance in the stranger. He has a perfect face. It is like Terry Lennox’s face in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. In fact, the beginning of the Long Goodbye is in the very tone of Malle’s film:

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

Alain Boyer has a spiritual kinship with Terry Lennox, but less canniness. American lady’s men survive. There’s no suicide for them.

There’s a beautiful scene in the film where he sits in a restaurant, contemplating drinking a cognac. It is the Cafe de Flore. He watches the people walking by out on the street. It is a simple montage, and yet, Malle shows exactly how it is seen – one sees it as a man who has condemned himself sees it. These people, their clothes, their hairdoes, their busy gestures, their cars - their matter - are purposeless. Suicide and total war are joined in that glance.

the sadian fucker as the civilized savage

This is the story of listomachia. Two lists. Two programs.

One program, the canonical program of imperial rationality, lists universals. But these universals turn out to be, on examination, universals-to-be. If the universals don’t seem to be universal, it is because the inhabitants of the border, the limit – the barbarian, the savage, the atavist, the criminal –have not yet disappeared. Disappearance and civilization are a couple. As civilization comes into contact with the savage, the savage must, to the resigned regret of the humanist, disappear. Patrick Brantlinger's Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 contains loads of quotes about the disappearance, or vanishing, of the savage:

In his multivolumen Races of Mankind (1873), another popularizer, Robert Brown, indicates that disease and infertility are the causes of the ‘decay of wild races,” but he also makes it plain that violence from whites is an equally important cause. Brown quotes George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand:

They had heard it said that it was a law of Nature that the coloured race should melt away before the advance of civilization. He would tell them where that law was registered: it was registered in hell, and its agents were those whom Satan made twofold more the children of hell than himself (3:199)

Although Selwyn’s “language is somewhat forcible, even for a Colonial bishop,” Brown writes, it is nevertheless true: the disappearance of wild r aces before the civilised is, for the greater part, as explicable as the destruction of wild animals before civilised sportsmen” (3:199) (9)

The two modes of disappearance are the active - the suggestion of hunting down and exterpating the savage, or, at the least, destroying utterly his customs and religion - and the passive - the observation that something drew the savage on to destruction as he or she encountered civilisation. Sometimes, of course, one supposed that the savage was already disappearing. In New Zealand, there was quite a vein of this kind of commentary. All the native animals, including the Maori, were already dwindling before the first white settlers set foot on the islands.

However, the moment the savage is slated to disappear is the moment that civilization’s emissaries become researchers. They are equipped with tests of all kinds, and they foray out to survey the savage. They list the typical responses, they record the savage’s mythology and break it up into a list of motifs, they record the organization of the savage’s sexual life and find the list of structures that it expresses, and finally they find that the savage was, all along, obeying the laws of the universal. He or she never was a stranger.

The second listing program begins to be compiled as reports come back from the New World. At the same time, humanists, rediscovering Greek and Latin texts, come across more and more information that seems to violate all Christian norms. Herodotus, especially, is a trove of reports on strange customs. In the French tradition, this listing program begins in Montaigne and continues through the ‘dangerous’ texts of Francois la Mothe le Vayer and into the texts of the great philosophes – Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot. In la Mothe le Vayer’s dialogue on scepticism, his sceptic, Ephestion, defending the ‘divine’ Sextus, alludes to the “morals, customs and divers opinions’ of peoples – habit, he says, is the ‘fifth element’ – in order to show that what we take to be settled and absolute differs wildly historically and culturally. According to Herodotus, for instance, Egyptian men piss squatting, while Egyptian women piss standing up; the men stay at home and weave, the women go out and work; the men carry jugs on their heads, the women carry burdens on their shoulders; among the ancient Indians, the beloved dead were eaten, and the Indians rejected with scorn the Greek custom of burial. According to Marco Polo, a people conquered by the Chinese had the pleasant custom of giving their wives and daughters to their guests to sleep with – the Chinese emperor banned the custom, but after three years relented to delegates sent from this people, who pointed out that the skies had become like iron and the crops had withered since the custom was abrogated. The savages of Ireland, even now, attach the plow to the tail of the horse, as the Scythians once did; the French man asks the parents for the hand of their daughter, which would be received as an insult in Moscow, where the parents are supposed to take the initiative. Look simply at the diversity of natural settings – the stars themselves are arranged differently in the Southern hemisphere. Look at the assessments of beauty – among the Chinese, the smallest eyes gain the most praise; among the Japanese, it is the face with the most powder, and the most scarred and pitted. Chinese nobles and the negros of Malabar both grow their fingernails as long as possible. Egyptian women dye their shameful parts and their thighs yellow. We kiss on the mouth, but the Arabs of Libya find that more shameful than kissing the ass, and for the same reason – the stink of the mouth and the asshole, their part in digestion, etc. We look at the paintings of our grandparents and we are shocked by the clumsiness of their clothes – so much do customs change among us.

This listing program – cultural relativism – becomes a story, the story, in De Sade, where the list of all the bizarre customs becomes a script for action by fuckers who are at the very center of civilization, popes, kings, and grands seigneurs.

I saw some ordinary slaughter/ I saw some routine atrocity




... and paint your legs red.

the crowned mask

“A preserved index counts some forty masks for comedy alone. And if one picks out the better masks in painting, ivory or terracotta preserved or actor statuettes and takes into account the exaggeration inherent to comedy, it will seem that the recognition that not seldom moved the performance of the mask maker to keep step with the writer is justified. Accordingly one understands that the greatest scholars of Greece and Rome, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Varro, held the masks to be worthy objects for their writing, and yet more, since the masks were completely essential to the success of a theatrical performance, that the greatest tragedian in Rome, Aesop, never put on the mask, without having studied its fine points industriously, and that another celebrated comedian, Ofilius Hilarus, by the meal after one of his most applauded representation, crowned the mask.” (The Physiognomik der Griechen, Richard Foerster, 14)

LI has criticized the methodological confusions of Paul Ekman, but we cannot say that those confusions are arbitrary, particular to Ekman, unmotivated, or even that they operate on the conscious level. Is it even fair to mix together a remark by the way – about the coming ‘disappearance’ of the people Ekman decided to study – with their appearance, as informant/curiosa, to be incorporated in a very sixties program, one that produces two registers (emotional content/facial expression) and matches them up under the sign of nature? Yet I don’t think that this remark – however unsourced and automatic – should be left out of an account of Ekman’s work, because that work, after all, revolves around universals that happen to be encoded, by a happy and uninspected historical coincidence, in distinct English pathic words, and the disappearance of people, of languages, of customs, before the universals of civilization is familiar – it is, in a sense, the great imperialist story.

In fact, I want show that the wholesale change in the emotional customs of Europe is circumstantially bound the coming of the market based industrial system, and that means showing how Europe disappeared a certain popular culture, certain tongues, certain time wasting attitudes – the savage within – at the same time that the savage without was disappearing. But it does not mean that the universal appears, suddenly, among a dominant class that has a preformed idea of how society is to change. Rather, there is a flow back and forth between ‘elite’ or erudite ideas and popular or vulgar superstitions. Honour Penury (see my post Wednesday) was not completely wrong about Isaac Newton, whose reintroduction of ‘occult forces’ – attraction at a distance – was quite a shock to the Cartesians. It visibly looked like a step backwards. Nor was the Cartesian physio-psychology that different from a folk psychology in which the body was imagined as a kind of kingdom, inhabited by different animal spirits.

It is harder to see this when we automatically attach labels like “pseudo-science” to epistemically organized topics like the reading of faces. Our contemporary physiognomy has formed an alliance with the contemporary trend towards a kind of maxi-Darwinism to form a scientific discourse that can endlessly design confirmatory experiments (show forty Inuit students pictures of Bollywood starlets making the Duchenne smile – rank their responses – etc.), while the older physiognomy got along with a metaphysics of signatures, but the output has a striking similarity. This is how Abbe Pernetty introduces Philosophical letters on Physiognomy (1746):
“I have to tell you from the very beginning that I renounce everything that is called Divination; that I have never understood how people who reason could believe in those vague predictions, founded on facial traits and the hand; on those supposedly necessary relations between those who are born and what is happening in the heavens at their birth; in those conformities with animals, established by an exterior resemblance of the figure: your mind and mine are agreed on the vanity of these presages (prestiges), which make for true misery in those who are afflicted with them, and dupes of those whom they flatter. I fly from the marvelous in everything that I have to say to you; and if sometimes I appear to be leading you there, this will not be because I am detaching myself from true nature, but because I am unveiling before your eyes some of its productions that are unknown to you.

I don’t know if magic is merely not that kind of discovery which one regards as supernatural until one knows its principle.” (5)

Having tried to show how the modern and nature are associated with each other in libertine discourse, it is time, perhaps, to go outward a step socially to those signatures of the passions the reading of which was as much a part of the politician’s equipment as the seducer’s.

Ekman addendum

“I did not know the Fore language, but with the help of a few boys who had learned Pidgin from a missionary school, I could go from English to Pidgin to Fore and back again.” – Paul Ekman

There was some ... strenuousity ... about LI’s big post yesterday. I re-wrote the damn thing several times to make it clearer My point is not that there are no emotional universals. I expect that there might be – although the universals might well be of form, the way emotions are assembled, rather than content. But one can be neutral about the universality of the emotions and still find the method by which these universals were ‘discovered’ in the 1960s a very curious, and yet very familiar, concoction. We have seen experts discovering ‘homosexuality’ in the face before. We have seen experts pondering the meaning of drawn or photographed faces before, too. In fact, there was a physiognomic literature in Babylon.

What is curious is that, in spite of using Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson as his (imaginary) interlocutors – his version of Descartes demon - Paul Ekman seems to have never questioned why the emotional universals were best expressed in Western languages and customs. He never seems, even, to have been puzzled by the fact that among scientists themselves, there have been and there continues to be strong disagreement about what emotions even are. If the rather small social cohort of psychologists are divided, even, on such basic questions as the origin of emotion – do emotions begin as a physiological stance and result in a feeling, or is the line of causation just the opposite? – then it would seem a very bold step indeed to simply ignore questions of affective sense making among the population one is taking photos of and questioning.

Anna Wierzbicka, in Emotions Across Languages and Cultures, makes a nice remark here:

“Until recently many scholars refused to believe that the categorization of ‘emotions’ can differ from language to language and insisted that at leas tsome ‘emotions’ must be linguistically recognized in all languages. There can no longer be any dobut, however, that this is not the case. Although much more is know about this diversity now then twenty or thirty years ago, the basic fact that in principle “emotion words” don’t match was known at that time too. Even an extreme ‘universalist” like Paul Ekman, who has claimed for decades that the same “basic emotions” (i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise, cf Ekman 1973 219-220; see also Ekman 1993, 1994a and b) are recognized in all cultures, acknowledged more than twenty years ago that the Dani people of the New Guinea Highlands, whose faces and “emotions” he had studied in the field, “don’t even have words for the six emotions” (Ekman 1975: 39)

There is a certain deep ... smugness about this whole enterprise. Why are we to think that the cut and fit of the English affective vocabulary turns out to exactly match universal emotions? What if it had had turned out that, say, the Ifaluk vocabulary was a better match for the emotional universals? That we would have to carve out, as our universal, a little bit of greed and a little bit of anger to express the universal emotion x, say. Or that a bit of anger, a bit of fear, a bit of surprise – something like awe – is the real universal emotion y. But no, English by a great stroke of luck has carved out exactly the universal emotions we as human beings are all equipped with. Congratulations, you Anglo Saxons and Norman invaders! Excellent job. We are all so proud.

One should note that surprise isn’t universally accepted among psychologists as an emotion at all. Jerome Kagan, for one, rejects it as an emotion. It is included by Ekman, however, because surprise does have a distinct facial expression. That facial expressions express emotion, for Ekman, means that emotion can be defined by way of facial expression – and thus, if there is a surprise face, there is a surprise emotion.

Well, I’m going to leave Ekman for a bit and return to physiognomy.

More Ekman: from facial expression to emotion

Paul Ekman’s account of his decision to go to New Guinea is related in his book, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication.

Ekman and Wally Friesen were working, at that time - in the late sixties - on the initial conceptualizing of a research project that could pick out universal emotions. To do this, Ekman decided he needed evidence of the passional life of some culture remote from Western society. He knew Carleton Gajdusek, “a neurologist who had been working for more than a decade in such isolated places in the highlands of Papua New Guinea...” And he knew Gajdusek had taken film of the Fore group. Gajdusek was working on kuru – a disease that literally creates holes in the brain. Gajdusek's work was crucial to the discovery of the prion, and he won a Nobel Prize for it after the same kind of disease - Mad Cow disease - turned up in the West.

“The films [the one hundred thousand feet of motion picture film shot by Gjdusek among New Guinea’s Stone age cultures – who, he realized, “would soon disappear” ] contained two very convincing proofs of the universality of facial expressions of emotion. First, we never saw an unfamiliar expression. If facial expressions are completely learned, then these isolated people should have shown novel expressions, ones we had never seen before. There were none.

It was still possible that these familiar expressions might be signals of very different emotions. But while the films didn’t always reveal what happened before or after an expression, when they did, they confirmed our interpretations. If expressions signal different emotions in each culture, then total outsiders, with no familiarity with the culture, should not have been able to interpret the expressions correctly.”

Ekman thus recognizes that there is a two fold task before him. However, at the very beginning of this project, we already see an omission in the way the research is constructed that hints at a system of omissions. We begin not, as in a psychological experiment of the classical type, with the person on whose face the emotion is imprinted. That person is not only absent, but their own self reports are not even under consideration. The first person aspect of emotion is, as it were, cut off in the same way that the face is cropped from the film, and the film crops the practices of everyday life. The images, cropped and then re-cropped, circulate not as commodities, but rather figure as curiosa - exotic objects that become the objects they are once they have entered into the domain of science. Thus, we begin this research on the universality of emotions by excluding the question of the feeling, the interpretation, of the person whose face is expressing the emotion. The question becomes: can I take the look on the face of this native as an objective cue that the native was experiencing this or that emotion. Having cut away the first person, who is at best the uncertain standard by whose testimony the classical psychological test goes forward, the two researchers then set themselves the task of translating the language of facial emotion as they see it in the film. The language of the face is already more than a metaphor, here. But it is a strange kind of non-verbal language, insofar as it is seems to precede the understanding of the "speaker" - the person across whose face expressions play. Yet, there is a deeper level of assumption here, which is that the viewers have the background knowledge simply to read this language. That such is their own self-positioning vis a vis the faces presented before them in the film seems to already presuppose that universality which they seek.

So: this research project has a twist. If Ekman and Friesen can read these cues successfully, they will prove that they are universal. And, as universal, that they are natural, innate, a language that the speaker can't help but speak. It is the helplessness of the speaker that allows us to omit the testimony of the person who is making the face. The facial expressions are not only almost a language, they are more than a language, they are a language in which intention is overriden. This isn't an exaggeration, but a precise description of the methodological assumptions followed by the two researchers.

Yet still, having made the necessary assumptions, how do the two researchers confirm their reading of the faces?

At this point, another move is made, and another omission emerges. One of the major issues in emotional ethnology is the evidence of the language on the ground – the vocabulary of emotions, and how they translate, or don’t, into English. By vocabulary, we are not simply speaking of a listing of words, but also of the affective schemas that organize the pathic words. Karl Heider uses the example of ‘love’ in English, which, he claims, is close to “happiness”, whereas the Indonesian ‘cinta’, which could be translated as love, is close to “sadness”. But it isn’t only location on the cognitive map – there is also the question of objectification. It is perfectly possible, in English, to say such things as: my life is happy. This utterance does not mean that my life has been a series of continuously happy feelings. it doesn't even imply that the speaker is is happy at the instance of the utterance. Rather, it assumes that there is an affective tone about a life, or about a long period of time, which makes sense in the affective vocabulary. That affective tone statement is distinct from the report of actual feeling, such as: I’m so happy. Thus, in English, the affective vocabulary can describe an actual mood, - it can describe an appraisal about how one ought to feel – and it can even, thus objectified, be detached from particular feelings to give a sense of a feeling tone over a long period of time. Why should we expect to find these particular conceptual practices in another culture? Or, perhaps more pertinently, how would we discover that this schema, or something different, is in operation? This is the kind of move one would especially expect in the sixties, the era of the linguistic turn. Yet instead of addressing the question of the native language that subtends the natural language of the face, Ekman avoids it. Instead, his next move is very peculiar:

It was still possible that these familiar expressions might be signals of very different emotions. But while the films didn’t always reveal what happened before or after an expression, when they did, they confirmed our interpretations. If expressions signal different emotions in each culture, then total outsiders, with no familiarity with the culture, should not have been able to interpret the expressions correctly.

I tried to think how Birdwhistell and Mead would dispute this claim. I imagined they would say, “It doesn’t matter that there aren’t any new expressions; the ones you did see really had different meanins. You got them right because you were tipped off by the social context in which they occurred. You never saw an expression removed from what was happening before, afterward, or at the same time. If you had, you wouldn’t have known what the expressions meant. To close this loophole, we brought Silvan from the East Coast to spend a week at my lab.

Before he came we edited the films so he could see only the expression itself, removed from its social context, just close up shots of a face. Silvan had no trouble at all. Every one of his interpretations fit the social context he hadn’t seen. What’s more, he knew exactly how he got the information. Wally and I could sense what emotional message was conveyed by each expression, but our judgments were intuitively based; we could usually not specify exactly what in the face carried the message unless it was a smile. Silvan walked up to the movie screen and pointed out exactly which specific muscular movements signaled the emotion.

We also asked him for his overall impression of these two cultures. One group he said seemed quite friendly. The other was explosive in their anger, highly suspicious if not paranoid in character, and homosexual. It was the Anga that he was describing. His account fit what we had been told by Gajdusek, who had worked with them. They had repeatedly attacked Australian officials who tried to maintain a government station there. They were known by their neighbors for their fierce suspiciousness . And the men led homosexual lives until the time of marriage.”

As I said, this is a peculiar move. Think of it. We have a film of facial expression. Assuming facial expression is universal, one could grant two observers, who have no contact with Fore culture, may correctly read the face. But notice how this is confirmed - by social cues. In other words, by scenes of Fore social life with which, admittedly, the two observers are not familiar. Thus, the confirmation of their facial readings is validated by the lesser certainties of their readings of the social context.

So, one wonders, what about that context?

Which brings us to the first tertiary person in this project: Gajdusek. When Ekman and Friesen talk about a "disappearing" people, the term, as they use it, seems to be projected onto Gajdusek. This is the reason he made his films. Now, of course, the notion that a people disappear, like magicians assistants or fairies, instead of being disappeared, like people who are slaughtered, have their land stolen, are cajoled by missionaries and sellers of alcohol, are force to assume habits and ways of living they don't want to, watch their children being kidnapped for education elsewhere, etc - is a not so fine piece of colonialist hypocrisy, very reminiscent of the old sixties days in Vietnam. My own assumption about what Gajdusek assumed, and what he told Ekman and Friesen, would have been that it was Gajdusek who told the researchers that the people were going to 'disappear' - but this assumption changed as I learned more about Gajdusek. The man not only won a Nobel prize, but he spent a year in jail for pederasty - being investigated originally for accounts that were published in professional journals of his diaries of the years among the Anga. Here’s the Guardian account of the case, from 1996. It is a couple of pages long. Sorry. But a long quote is necessary.

“A Nobel prizewinner is studying a faraway tribe. He describes how boys routinely and willingly have sex with their elders. He shares a bed with the children, then takes some home with him to continue his research. When he wins the Nobel, there they are, on the stage next to him. Has he committed a crime? QBY:Peter Martin
On 4 April last year, as Dr Daniel Gajdusek was flying back from a conference on BSE in Geneva, FBI agents were raiding both his office and his home in Maryland, USA. They took away files, disks, photographs, film, and notebooks. That same evening, when he drew into his driveway with a doctor colleague, a dozen FBI agents leapt from cover and arrested 72-year-old Gajdusek at gunpoint. Charged with paedophilia specifically, two counts of sexual assault on teenage minors, plus two counts of violating a Maryland law prohibiting oral sex then as now, he protests his innocence. He told the Washington Post that he was as much a paedophile `as Jesus Christ and Mother Teresa, who are also unmarried and love children'.
Scheduled to begin at 9am on Tuesday at the County Court House, Frederick City, Maryland, the trial is a considerable cause celebre for the FBI. Alleged paedophile cases are notoriously hard to prosecute and even harder to win, let alone get right. Remember Cleveland and Orkney? In America, too, most cases brought are either lost or abandoned. The McMartin `satanic abuse' debacle is still the US benchmark: ending in acquittals all round in l989, the case had taken five years and $15m to prepare and, at two and a half years, remains the longest trial in American history. Spearheaded by the FBI, the favoured strategy now is to go after individuals, and targets don't come much more high profile than Gajdusek: head of the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, and a Nobel prizewinner besides.
His closest colleagues, including the eminent Aids researcher, Robert Gallo, who stumped up part of his $350,000 bail, insist that Gajdusek is merely the latest victim of America's raging preoccupation with child abuse. Maryland state's attorney Scott Rolle, who'll be prosecuting come Tuesday, said he's not surprised at the denials and the disbelief. `It's a common reaction to paedophile charges. But most paedophiles aren't seedy-looking men in trench coats. If it's a disease, it can afflict anybody doctors, lawyers, even Nobel prize laureates.' Whatever the trial's outcome, Gajdusek has longed admitted to a love of children in particular, children from the Stone Age tribes of New Guinea and Micronesia where, back in the Fifties, he started his ground-breaking researches into rare diseases, including kuru, a variant of CJD. Since then, figuring he owed a debt to the communities he worked in, he has `adopted' no fewer than 56 such children, most-ly boys, and paid for their education in America. Typically, when he collected his Nobel prize, he took eight of `his' children on to the rostrum with him, and promised to use the $80,000 prize to send them to college. But that was 1976, a more liberal and, in some ways, a more naive time, and nobody thought much about it.
The sequence of events which led to Gajdusek's arrest last year tells a good deal about how the times and temper have changed. Because of his importance as a scientist, the NIH had been publishing his working journals at intervals since the mid-Sixties. Full of wild and woolly fieldwork surgery carried out in primitive up-country conditions, treatments, epidemiology, trading beads and salt (often with dedicated cannibals) for native corpses in order to carry out postmortems they're quite a ripping read. The journals also contain a number of passages describing the traditional homosexual practices of several of the tribes Gajdusek worked and lived with. According to the NIH, much of this material had been in the public domain for 30 years. But it wasn't until l995 that an outraged citizen alerted a member of a senate committee who, in turn, suggested that the FBI check out the journals as possible evidence of a paedophile tendency in their author.
Several entries concern tribes in New Guinea whose young boys achieved manhood through oral sex with older village men. Local belief has it that while females are born `complete', boys cannot grow to proper manliness without ingesting semen. Although Gajdusek is not the only scientist to have described such customs, the FBI was made suspicious by the undetached candour of his writings.
4 August, 1962: `The young boys do not hesitate, as a mark of affection, to indicate that they would like to suck one's penis, and in private they expect that this favour will be instantly accepted as a sign of their friendship... There is obviously a good deal of jesting and shaming associated with this sexuality when it is not carried out `just right'. Modesty and shame are evident in any public reference to it. What is `just right' involves knowledge of the `style' of the relationships.' 27 December, 1969: `Ekoro, Yewei, Mbondo, Awamu and Sengo and [blank space] slept with me last night and I find the children as gentle and kind and playful as at the start of my sojourn. I love them.' 9 November, 1971: `Whenever I respond to the overtures of one of the young boys by letting them cling to me, by hugging them or walking with them hand in hand, their adult relatives, often their fathers, knowingly smile and without ambiguity indicate that I should let the boys play sexually with me, and the suggestion is only made slightly more seriously and with but a bit more levity than would accompany a suggestion that one accept a gift of food.' For all the physical and emotional intimacy they express, the journals contain no evidence or description of Gajdusek engaging in sexual activity. So, next, the FBI set out to interview his adoptees, past and present. Although some were far flung, the FBI tracked down over 20 individuals and asked each of them: had Gajdusek ever done anything to them of a sexual nature? Most were reportedly horrified at the suggestion, but one man a 23-year-old Gajdusek was still putting through college in Maryland said yes: as a teenager, he'd suffered numerous assaults by his guardian. Through this witness, the FBI then located a 14-year-old who has made similar charges.
And then there's the tape. Prosecutor Scott Rolle says he's also in possession of a recorded phone conversation, taped by the FBI last March, between the 23-year-old student and Gajdusek. On it, he alleges, Gajdusek admits to the assaults on both boys, apologises, and begs him not to tell. At one point, Rolle says, the student asked, `Do you know what a paedophile is?' To which Gadjusek is alleged to have replied, `I am one'.
Nor is that all. Back in 1989, police in nearby Montgomery County investigated allegations of sexual abuse by Gajdusek made by two local youths, not adoptees. According to the police: `The investigation was suspended because we were unable to uncover any current victims.' On Tuesday, it is unlikely that the jurors of Frederick County will know what to make of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. The eccentric's eccentric, the odds of him finding a collar, tie and matching shoes to turn up in are not good. Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet an early mentor and a Nobel prizewinner himself once described his `exasperated fondness' for the young Gajdusek, adding that he had `an intelligence quotient in the 180s and the emotional maturity of a 15-year-old'.
Born in 1923 to poor first-generation immigrants from Slovakia, who'd settled in Yonkers, New York, the boy Daniel was precocious in the extreme. A keen entomologist while still in short trousers, he collected bugs of every sort and, to kill them, he synthesised a poison which later became the basis of a weedkiller patent. At his high school graduation, he was summoned to the stage 10 times to collect scholarships. `By the tenth one,' as his younger brother Robert recalled, `the audience was on its feet for a standing ovation.' Next, he took a biophysics degree at the University of Rochester, then finished Harvard Medical School in three years instead of four with a degree in pediatrics. Restless still, he moved to the California Institute of Technology, under the tutelage of Professor Linus `Vitamin C' Pauling, who would later win a brace of Nobels. Finally hooked by a passion for virology, Gajdusek then went in search of rare diseases and plagues in Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey: a bootstrap and backpack explorer-scientist out of the nineteenth century. In Australia, he worked for Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who wrote of him: `He apparently has no interest in women but an almost obsessional interest in children, none whatever in clothes or cleanliness; and he can live cheerfully in a slum or a grass hut.' But Gajdusek's career proper started in 1957, when he first fetched up in New Guinea. There, the local Australian medical officer, Vincent Zigas, told him of a strange, invariably fatal disease, called kuru, that was common among the tribes of the island's interior. As Zigas later wrote of Gajdusek's keenness to know more: `I was machine-gunned by his numerous questions. I had barely answered one when another would be asked.' Zigas showed him a few victims some with the shakes and a stumbling gait (ataxia), others in paralysis and nearer to death. To Gajdusek, it seemed to be a degenerative brain disease like CJD; but whereas CJD mostly struck the over-fifties, kuru could affect children as young as 13.
Machetes in hand, Gajdusek, Zigas and a few helpers set off for the interior, where they eventually located the Fore tribe. At first making no connection between the fact of their being cannibals and the high incidence of kuru among them, Gajdusek set about trying to treat and to investigate the disease there and then. A team of Australian scientists who'd planned to study kuru were elbowed out of the way, and within 10 months of clapping eyes on his first kuru case, Gajdusek announced the discovery of this hitherto unknown disease in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In the way of these things, a British scientist, William Hadlow, then suggested that kuru was very similar to sheep scrapie, which at that time was thought to be a viral disease. In turn, picking up on the idea that kuru might be viral, too, Gajdusek set about determining how it might be transmissible. Then it struck him: cannibalism: people eating kuru-infected corpses. It certainly fitted the local pattern: kuru mostly afflicted young women and children, and whenever the Fore set about ritually devouring a body, the brain the most infective part was usually left to the women and children. Proof of kuru's transmittability came when Gajdusek successfully infected some lab chimps with brain material taken from kuru victims. What won him the Nobel prize, however, was his conceptual leap about what he called `slow-acting' viruses, which anticipated Aids, and his work on brain degeneration, which radicalised the scientific approach to the likes of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. Since then, a whole other series of connections has opened up: linking scrapie-infected cattle feed, BSE and `new strain' CJD, which typically strikes young people. Another ghastly symmetry is that kuru, BSE and `new strain' CJD are just about identical short incubation, ataxic shakes and staggering, eventual loss of limb function, same area of the brain attacked. Which is not how Messrs Dorrell and Hogg have ever chosen to put it.
True, Gajdusek's assertion that spongiform diseases are viral has lately been overtaken by a new orthodoxy that the culprits are rogue proteins, called prions. But the matter remains moot: neither school has yet managed to isolate the actual disease agent. It turns out, too, that the Fore probably didn't get kuru simply by eating diseased brain. The thinking now, as for BSE, is that you need a blood-route lesion for the agent to get in: an ulcer, a cut, or open gums as when children loose their milk teeth. Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food consulted Gajdusek a few times about BSE and CJD but, as its actions before and since have demonstrated, Maff needed the connection to be impossible.
But let's rewind to the early Sixties, and Gajdusek's growing sense of debt towards the communities he was working with; that's in the journals, too. Prior to his arrival, the Fore believed that kuru was a consequence of sorcery, as practised by the hostile tribes that surrounded them, but Gajdusek convinced them that kuru was a disease. And since he cured other ailments dysentry, yaws and so on the Fore came to believe that he might cure kuru, too.
But he felt obliged to disabuse them a delicate thing to attempt, given the Fore's precipitate sense of betrayal and quickness to murderous violence. He also told them that the only hope of a cure was if they would allow him to continue to study them, including cutting up their corpses. The Fore agreed. They also apologised for their frequent angers with him, explaining that it was the kuru their dread of it, that they were dying, and that their village was getting smaller as the jungle reclaimed it which made them behave so badly. Gajdusek began `adopting' children from his research communities around 1963, bringing them to America, and paying for their education. Some were orphans, but most came with their parents' permission. Today, many are lawyers and civil servants in America and elsewhere, and a good number are pursuing successful careers back in their native countries. A few subsequently sent their own children, or their nieces and nephews, into Gajdusek's charge. According to neighbours, Gajdusek's was a rambunctious household, the kids often running quite wild when he was away on field trips. But it was also a stimulating household, with Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead among the regular visitors.
At the the time of Gajdusek's arrest, four children were living in his Maryland home, three boys and a girl, now all taken into state care. His journals suggest that Gajdusek has long been torn between America and his life on the tribal islands. `To be part of this is rewarding,' he once wrote. `To escape it and come back to it in small but intense doses is like cheating, and I know that, on both sides of my life, I can be accused of fraud and unfair involvement.' This neither-one-nor-the-other sense of undeservingness, coupled with a sexual ambiguity, is shot through his writings, as in this 1961 journal entry, made at the end of an arduous field trip on Falalap Island in the Ulithi Atoll: `The children trusted me without much hesitation, gave themselves to me, and many individuals gave me a personal share in their lives, their passions, their sensuality, their aspirations, which I but little deserved and for which I tried to give all of myself in gratitude.' From Tuesday, it will be for the jury to decide on Gajdusek's guilt or innocence, based on the testimony of two witnesses and the FBI's tape recording. As for content of his journals, who could say for sure? For the defence, attorney Mark Hulkower insists: `The journals add nothing to the case. They're reports of what Dr Gajdusek observed in foreign cultures, and contain no evidence of inappropriate behaviour on his part.' Prosecutor Scott Rolle insists that they're `nothing but the musings of a potential paedophile. It was something that he was obviously flirting with.' Back on 4 April last year, as Gajdusek was taken into jail, reporters asked him point blank if he was a paedophile. He replied, `No. Not in the way that you are using the term, so I say no.'

Hmm. One wonders what to make of the juxtaposition between Ekman’s original claim – “You got them right because you were tipped off by the social context in which they occurred” – and Gajdusek’s journal entry - `Whenever I respond to the overtures of one of the young boys by letting them cling to me, by hugging them or walking with them hand in hand, their adult relatives, often their fathers, knowingly smile and without ambiguity indicate that I should let the boys play sexually with me..” Was this one of those social contexts he guessed, from the film?

I don’t think so. I think Ekman’s notion that the social cueing he saw in the film was enough for him to infer the meaning of the facial expressions, and from those facial expressions accurately describe a phenomenon that is a compound of feeling and appraisal, the latter of which is couched in the language and the conceptual schemas of the Anga, seems methodologically unlikely.

I’m not, of course, finished Ekman piece, yet.

Isabel Marant, fall 2008

Thousands of people have been emailing LI, asking one and only one question: who are you looking at in fall fashion this year? We have, of course, been remiss in not linking to more fashion blogging, but to answer the questions that keep pouring in: keep you eye on Isabel Marant. If Santogold is Summer, 2008, Isabel Marant is fall, 2008. Now, people like to say that Isabel is not fashion forward, but is – watch for the patronizing tone! – wearable. Marant is anything but hieratic, having an intuitive feel for the accepting line, for the energy produced by the moving body. No, she isn’t loading the fashion system on the shoulders of her girls, or vying to produce some intergalactic silhouette a la Martin Margiela. There is a reason that this year, her show was in a big tent at the foot of the Eiffel Tower with a long long walk – acceptance is all about movement, as you can see here.
So, I hope that satisfies LI’s many, many many questioners.

Marx, Gramsci and Honour Penury

A curious thing happened to Jane Ellard in 1738. Ellard was walking in Grosvenor Square when – well, this is her account:

... two Women came up to me from the other Side of the Way, and told me I had a mighty pretty Gown on; - pray, says one of them, what did it cost a Yard? I informed them what I gave for it; Oh! 'tis a sweet pretty Thing they said, - pray which Way are you walking? I told them I was going to look after a Place; they said I should have the Refusal of two or three very good Places, and if I would tell them where I liv'd, they certainly would come and give me Directions about them. I told them that I should be very much obliged to them, and that I lodged at Mr. Pullen's, in George-Alley , by the Ditch Side. The next Day as the Bells rung Eleven, they came up Stairs; I am very positive to the Prisoner; the other Woman that was with her pass'd for the Prisoner's Mistress. I asked them about the Place they were to help me to, but they told me they were Apprentices to Sir Isaac Newton , at Turnham-Green, and that they must first calculate my Nativity; so out they pull'd a great Book with Heads and Hands in it; they told me a vast deal out of the Book with the Heads and Hands in it, and said I must bundle up all the Things I had, - Rings, Money, and Cloaths. I have but little Money, says I, and I don't Care to bundle up my Cloaths, that can relate nothing to my Fortune, - that's quite silly, and if any body should hear this Business besides our selves, they would laugh at us. Well, they argued with me a great while, and said it must be done, and began to be angry because I would not do it. Why, - says one of them, suppose you were Sick, and a Physician comes and prescribes Physick for you, - if you won't take it, what Good can he do you? 'Tis all the same Thing, we can't pretend to do you any Good, unless you'il do as you are ordered. At last I bundled up all my Cloaths, and they went away, but they returned again, and asked me if I had done as they bad me? I said I had, and that I had put them in my Trunk. Then now, says the Prisoner's Mistress, - with the Blessing of God take them out of your Trunk; I did so: Now, says she, with the Blessing of God, get a Ha'p'orth of Brown Paper. I did not care to go for the Paper, so she went herself, and did up all my Cloaths, telling me they must be done up very close, and not a Breath of Air must come upon them. When this was done they bid me down upon my Knees and say the Lord's Prayer; I refused at first, but by fair Means and foul they made me at last say the Lord s Prayer. Then they bid me turn about and open the Windows, which we had shut, for fear any body should see what we were about. I opened the Windows, and in the mean Time they chang'd the Bundle, and left this in the Room of it, - 'tis full of nothing but Hay and Straw; my Bundle was made up exactly like this Bundle, and they carry'd it quite off.”

I find that a fascinating account. In my post last week disputing the simple outline Marx gives of ideology, viz, that the dominant ideas of an era express the ideas of the dominant class, I wrote that, on the face of it, this notion gives us no idea of how, exactly, such a thing would happen. Ideas aren’t communicated via telepathy. Rather, they have to be materialized in symbols and distributed in some material way. Now, this interests me for the following reason: I, too, am dealing with hegemonic and subordinate ideas as I outline a theory about r how a shift in the passional norms in a society came about at the end of the early modern period. In particular, I think the shift towards happiness as a feeling/goal legitimating social and political action made its appearance in Europe in the eighteenth century not only in the writing of political economists, but across the board in the writings of novelists, poets, doctors, philosophers, naturalists, etc. Still, this is a writing culture, and the question is, how was this rooted in the everyday life of the masses?

This is a question that has long tormented historians. Gramsci, in the Prison notebooks, devoted long passages to the relationship between “intellectuals” [which he defined like this: “By intellectuals, one must understand not [only] those ranks commonly referred to by this term, but generally the whole social mass that exercises an organizational function in the broad sense, whether it be in the field of production, or culture, or political administration: they correspond to the noncommissioned and junior officers in the army (and also to some field officers excluding the general staff in the narrowest sense of the term) (133)] and the people. He tried to reshape the Marxist notion of ideology in more palatable sociological terms, find roles and social locations for intellectuals in this broader sense, although – as is apparent from the army comparison – he still toys with a vertical idea of the intellectual, who receives ideas coming on high and transmits them to people lower on the chain. However, Gramsci sets up the relationship so that one can infer, here, a horizontal plane as well. This would be the “psychological” attitude, as Gramsci puts it, to his class. But on the horizontal plane, there is also, necessarily, an interchange that is not simply the relay of ideas from on high. Rather, even the teacher who listens with contempt to some superstitious talk by his charges is absorbing information about attitudes. One of the effects of the social unconscious is just this: that one never quite knows what one has absorbed, or from who, or how it affects what one thinks. And if we remember that, instead of single chains of commands, in reality, in the field of production, culture, political administration, etc., there are struggles and rivalries between different groups on every level – then we have a sense of how ideas from the horizontal can influence ideas from the vertical.

This might seem pretty far afield from my last post, which was about Ekman. But before I go into Ekman’s theory, I thought I’d defend, a little bit, my assumption that the pattern revealed by that theory has a relation to various ‘programs’, as Derrida calls them, that have organized passion, temperament, and national and racial identity in the modern era. It isn’t true that the programs just work through intellectual texts – rather, they also work upon popular culture, whilst at the same time absorbing conceptual schemas from popular culture.

When Honour Penery and her associated decided to gull Jane Ellard, they claimed to be assistants to Isaac Newton. This claim is pretty extraordinary in that it implies knowledge of Isaac Newton in a social scene where one wouldn’t expect that name, in 1738, to have a lot of resonance. But it does. Elite cultural icons, here, substitute seamlessly for the icons of colportage – for Nostradamus, say. And that substitution is relatively quick – it isn’t spread, for instance, over the centuries by a church, the way the name Aristotle was so diffused through European culture by Catholic teaching that his name ended up as the author of a best selling, rather smutty book of pseudo-gynecology. Another oddity here is that, indeed, just as the Enlightnment was sanctifying Newton and conveniently forgetting the man who devoted years to astrology and numerology, his ‘assistants’ with their “great Book with Heads and Hands” accidentally – by a poetic chance – were closer to the spirit of the great man than many a French philosophes.

So if, in my next post, God willing, I make certain assumptions about the physiognomic roots of Ekman’s otherwise structuralist-age theories, I do so in the spirit of Honour Penury.

The 'language' of emotion

Paul Ekman, in an interview here, traces the path that led him to his famous tabulation of emotions articulated in a universal “language” of facial expressions. It was a path composed of two parts. One was Cold War circumstance: like many a human sciences researcher in the fifties and the sixties, Ekman was able to pretty easily squeeze money out of the Defense Department for his project, which was to go to “an isolated area of New Guinea” and film ‘stone age’ people. The point of the filming – and this is the intellectual path – was to settle a dispute between the Boasians – Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson – and the Darwinians – which were represented by Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins claimed that emotional expression on the face was innate, so that smiling, for instance, meant the same thing across humankind. Tomkins theory was a bit more complicated than is allowed by the term “expression”, since, in a gesture to the James-Lange hypothesis, he believed that the face fedback emotion – smiling not only is a universal expression of happiness, but a happiness-maker. In Ekman’s essay on Sylvan Tomkins in Exploring Effect, he repeats the claim that, as far as he knew, Tomkins was unique in his empirical research about the face, although he concedes that other researchers had tried and failed in using photos of expression to evoke, in random, unconnected observers, responses that read the expression. What is odd, here, is that, of course, there was a whole science, or pseudo-science, that made very strong claims about the face: physiognomy.

Of course, there is a reason for that: physiognomy was associated, in the sixties, with racial science. With the measuring of noses, foreheads and ears by Nazi doctors. Although behind those Nazi doctors was the revival of physiognomy in the Weimar era – as the Sinngebung der Sinnlose, as Theodore Lessing put it – that was pursued not just on the right, but on the left as well. Lessing, like his friend Ludwig Klages, was fascinated by physiology, but unlike Klages, he leaned left, being a well known socialist and fellow traveler of the Marxists. Rudolf Kassner had his own philosophical mystical physiognomik. All were influenced by the romantics. But all differed in that they rid themselves of the demon of analogy that insisted on macrocosmic meanings in the microsphere. Physiognomy assumed an atomic emotional base, but its main goal was to read temperament from the face. How that temperament is imprinted on the face is the question.

It is worth reproducing Ekman’s list of the points the Tomkins facial theory, since my next post is going to be about Ekman:

· The face is central to emotion and has priority over visceral changes because of its speed, visibility and precision.
· The face informs the self, not just others. Feedback of the facial response is the experience of the affect.
· Emotion is guided by innate inherited programs.
· We learn the language of the face partly through correspondence between what a face looks like and what it feels like.
· Every face has a predominant expression which shines through poses and spontaneous expressions
· Individual differences in the interpretation of facial expression reflect the personality of the perceiver, which resulted in the idea of examining affect sensitivity contours.
· Particular emotions are commonly confused because of shared neurophysiology, shared situational contexts, response overlap and the likelihood of occurring together.”

We are gonna do a couple of posts about this.