Biggie and Robert Burns

I’m working on a little review of a Robert Burns biography. And, by one of those coincidences that strolls over to you and puts its muzzle in your palm, looking for the sugar, Biggie’s biopic is out. Notorious. You say, where’s the coincidence? In your pants? I say, Burns is, with two centuries difference, so so recognizable in the rap star persona.

So let’s lay this down.

Burns is, for one thing, a big cocksman, and proud of it – although my biographer is, as they all are, too apologetic about it to look at it. Burns had perhaps six, seven bastards by various women, which on the one hand is a great curse on the women, and not excusable even back then – contraception was by no means unknown of. On the other hand, lets not pretend that in the cauld cauld age of patriarchy, there was an infinite difference in the treatment the married woman and the single mother could expect, or that the children who'd been routed into this world through the good and proper channel of a Calvinistic blind poke on the marriage bed were infinitely a different matter. Burns raised some of the children - or his poor wife Jean did – and some were raised by girlfriends who got married themselves.

Jean Armour, Robert Louis Stevenson thought, informed by some rumor, never loved Robert. This is probably not so. She definitely bore with him, and definitely lay with him right willingly. She had three of his children before they got married, and he did miss his “sweet armload” even when he was cavorting with a higher class of people. Most biographers have stumbled and been quite horrified about a letter he wrote to his friend Ainslie about her on the eve of her giving birth to twins – before he married her:

'Jean I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, destitute and friendless; all for the good old cause: I have reconciled her to her fate: I have reconciled her to her mother: I have taken her a room: I have taken her to my arms: I have given her a mahogany bed: I have given her a guinea; and I have f---d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But — as I always am on every occasion — I have been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree; I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl, and I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones. Oh, what a peacemaker is a guid, weel-willy pintle ! It is the mediator, the guarantee, the umpire, the bond of union, the solemn league and covenant, the plenipotentiary, the Aaron's rod, the Jacob's staff, the prophet Elisha's pot of oil, the Ahasuerus' Sceptre, the sword of mercy, the philosopher's stone, the Horn of Plenty, and Tree of Life between Man and Woman. »

Myself, I don’t take this as the literal truth of the matter. That Burns could get it up for two big fucks while Jean, nine months pregnant, was being electrified by his thundering scalade – I sense a joke, here. It wasn’t, however, a joke that Burnsians have appreciated – in Victorian times, this letter was heavily edited, and now, in our politically correct times, my biographer opines that maybe Jean was in pain from the application of the Aaron’s rod.

Burns was a great believer in fucking, and recommended it as the remedy against war in his political poems, as in:

“Some cry Constitution
Some cry Revolution
And Politics kick up a Row:
But Prince and Republic
Agree on the subject
No treason is in a good mowe”

(mowe is the Scots for fuck.)
–
Burns, in fact, was a lot more happy about cunt – or cunthappy - than Biggie, who was much more sentimental and responsible in many ways:

What do you do
When your bitch is untrue?


This wasn’t such a problem for Burns, who had a looser sense indeed about untrue and not. My biographer claims that there is some evidence of Burns corresponding with Mary Wollstonecraft – I do wonder, if this is true, what could have been in those letters? But unlike a cocksman like, say, Henry Miller, Burns loved to look through the eyes of the very women he ‘seduced’. As Raymond Bentman has pointed out in his edition of the Collected Poems, no male eighteenth century poet, and perhaps no other comparable English poet, wrote as many poems in the female voice. His poem, Wha’ll mow me now? Is about the predicament he left many in – for instance, Jenny Clow in Edinburgh, who he seemed to have fucked primarily because she was the maid of an upper class woman he was obsessed with (Burns always fucked maids and peasants of his own class, and was always falling in love with upper class women). In this case, the woman is a prostitute:

Wha’’ll mow me now, my joe
An wha’ll mow me now
A sodger with his bandeleers
Has banged my belly fu’.

Now I maun stole the scornfu’ sneer
O mony a saucy quine
When, curse upon her godly face!
Her cunt’s as merry’s mine.

Biggie, too, mixes sex and class:

“The rap slayer the hooker layer
Muthafucka say your prayers
(Hail Mary full of grace)
Smack the bitch in her face
Take her Gucci bag and the North Face off her back
Jab her if she act
Funny wit the money
Oh you got me mistakin honey
I don't wanna rape ya
I just want the paper”

It is an old story, now, among the tracers of music, that the Scots song mixed in the south with African song, especially Fon and Yoruba songs. There were similar clan systems, similar raiding cultures, similar codes of honor and ecstasy. That some of Robert Burns has made its stealthy way into Biggie Smalls music should be no surprise. Burns was, as well, Walt Whitman’s model – a poet of the people, a literal ploughman poet, with little Latin, no Greek – but an early training in the schools that his father, a tenant farmer, could send him to. Like Biggie, Robert Burns early on found flash his way out of a society he felt was too small for him. This is Robert Louis Stevenson’s shrewd appraisal:

“Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more consequence than himself:" with all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and remark. His father wrote the family name BURNES; Robert early adopted the orthography BURNESS from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to BURNS. It is plain that the last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom. Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation. To no other man's have we the same conclusive testimony from different sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk. Robertson the historian "scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour;" the Duchess of Gordon declared that he "carried her off her feet;" and, when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine by any means. He made himself feared in the village for his tongue. He would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps - for the statement of Sillar is not absolute--say cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back. At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses. These details stamp the man. He had no genteel timidities in the conduct of his life. He loved to force his personality upon the world. He would please himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing JEHAN for JEAN, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade.”

Just as Biggie was by no means conventionally handsome, neither was Burns – every observer says he was too “dark” to be handsome. No milk white skin enveloped our poet, and his seductions had to be conducted by boldness and a gifted, supremely gifted tongue. Nelly Miller, who was a Mauchline neighbor, recalled that he “na to ca a bonie man: dark and strong; but uncommon invitin’ in his speech – uncommon! Ye could na hae cracket wi him for ae minute, but ya wad hae studen four or five.”

Even more than his flash, though, what disturbed the Victorians was his politics. The letter that he sent Ainslie about fucking Jean was repressed by Burnsians – the poem, The Liberty Tree, was disavowed as something that certainly couldn’t be by the author of Auld Lang Syne! With its cracking verse:

King Loui’ thought to cut it down
When it was unco sma’, man
For this the watchman cracked his crown
Cut off his head and a man.

Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, who drew back from the excesses of the French Revolution, Burns, who knew men were hanged for theft and women were transported for prostitution (a trade that he had some kindness for, except when it came to Marie Antoinette), was not disturbed by the murder of the royalty. “What is there in delivering a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute to the hands of the hangman.” Given the fact that it was awful easy, in 1793, for a man to get thrown into the hulks for Burns’ sentiments, he was pretty open about what he thought. But by 1793 he had seven kids and debts and was working as a cop – the equivalent, I suppose, of working as a Drug Enforcement agent. He was an exciseman, policing the district of Dumfries and capturing smugglers. This was a job that he had serious doubts about – after all, Burns’ favorite literary character was Satan in Paradise Lost. To keep himself in his job, he wrote the occasional servile poem of loyalty – but in all of them he would put in sly jabs at the King.

Biggie’s songs about drugs have the outlaw flavor of Burns’ own sentiments about politics. Supposedly, from the proceeds of one of his snatches, Burns bought some cannons and had them shipped to the French revolutionaries in 1792 – a pretty outrageous gesture.

Well, I should sign this off with a link to my favorite Biggie song – I can’t ever get enough of this song:

“When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell
Cause Im a piece of shit, it aint hard to fuckin tell
It dont make sense, goin to heaven wit the goodie-goodies
Dressed in white, I like black tims and black hoodies
God will probably have me on some real strict shit
No sleepin all day, no gettin my dick licked
Hangin with the goodie-goodies loungin in paradise
Fuck that shit, I wanna tote guns and shoot dice
All my life I been considered as the worst
Lyin to my mother, even stealin out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin abortion
She dont even love me like she did when I was younger
Suckin on her chest just to stop my fuckin hunger
I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes?
Forgive me for my disrespect, forgive me for my lies”

The lying image of happiness

”We have here reached the fundamental question, which is no longer related to the point of departure. The general question would be this: Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation? Further question: Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which rest on them?” – Marx, Grundrisse

At the end of the essay on the relationship between the art of the state and happiness, Forster uses a rather strange metaphor. He surveys the “secret workshop” of history, that which is at the center of all the rises and falls of all the world empires – which is human nature. And within human nature, one thing remains the same: reason. Reason is the binding universal, in the end.



Which leads him to this paragraph:


We want to leave it to speculative philosophy to find out why sensuality [Sinnlichkeit] must always almost constantly so overbalance reason, that the liberated effect of the latter is almost unnoticeable, and the governance of the world [Weltregierung] wins the appearance of a chaos, whose elements no sooner organize themselves, than a mighter attraction pulls them apart again: a chaos, where the rise and destruction of shapes sweeps before our eyes. We don’t want to investigate here the ways in which so many thousand millions of men have been so burdened down that a sad state of slavery has almost completely cut them off from the development of their capacity for perfection, and what compensation there is, or even should be, for them. When the only species, however, whose nature is characterized by moral freedom has, up to this point, given scope in a mostly incomplete way to extremely few members to enjoy this privilege; or, to use a convenient likeness, among millions of caterpillars hardly one succeeds in bringing to completion its metamorphosis into the shape of a butterfly that can lightly wing its paths through the aether and unfettered enjoy both its existence and the world: can it, ought it then annoy a man that somewhere it can be plausibly shown that henceforth the examples of this glorious development will be more common?”

There’s a certain shock in the example of the caterpillar and the butterfly – a balance between a dystopia of worms and a utopia of freedom. The idea that, during the whole course of history, the great mass never succeeded in shedding their worm-like state brings us back to the facts of “world governance” – for who has created the nurseries full of perpetual caterpillars than the prince butterflies? Forster’s further point, here, is that happiness, as the bond between the governors and the governed, must be questioned. “Finally, my friend, it seems like the time has come for that lying image of happiness which has stood so long in the path of mankind, to fall from its pedestal, and the true signpost [Wegweiser – pointer of the way] of life, human worth, to be put in its place.”

What happens when the lying image of happiness is thrown from its pedestal? It would seem, from Forster’s thesis, that either the state would dissolve entirely, having lost its function, or that the revolutionary moment would illuminate the structure of human worth in such a way that we would see it as, ultimately, identical to true happiness.

In the next post, I’m going to leap more than half a century to Marx’s notion of the “universal subject” – one that is undergoing, apparently, a translation from the merely locally human to an all sided subjectivity as dramatic as the caterpillar’s metamorphosis into the butterfly – in the passages in the First Notebook of the Grundrisse noted by Calasso.

Universal history begins on the Moon

“America changed the moon forever…” (152) - Mary Campbell, Wonder and Science

At some time in the year 1648, there was a party in a house in Paris owned by M. de Cuigy le fils. The conversation turned to the full moon, which was particularly brilliant that night. Everyone expressed some opinion or joke about the moon – for instance, that it was really the sun, which was peaking at the earth from a hole in the heavens to see what was going on behind its back, so to speak. One man was standing by rather moodily, silent. This man, Cyrano de Bergerac, was finally asked what he thought:

“And me,” I told them, wishing to mix my enthusiasm with yours, I believe, without entertaining myself with the sharpended fantasies by which you are tickling time to make it go quicker, that the moon is a world like this one; to which our serves as its moon.” Some of my friends regaled me with a great howl of laughter. “And just like this,” I said, “they may be mocking now, on the Moon, at somebody who is maintaining that this globe here is a world.” But however much I alleged that many great men had been of this opinion, I only forced them to laugh all the more.

This thought, however, of which the boldness skewed my humor, hardened by contradiction, plunged so deeply into me that, all during my walk home, I was pregnant with a thousand definitions of the moon, of which I could not give birth: so much so that, by the force of supporting this burlesque belief by quasi-serious arguments, it almost came about that I already couldn’t get the idea out of my head, when the miracle or the accident, providence, fortune, or perhaps what one would name vision, fiction, chimera or madness, if you like, furnished me with the occasion to begin this discourse. Having arrived back home, I went up to my reading room where I discovered, lying on a table, an open book that I hadn’t put there. It was of Cardan, and though I had no plan just then to read, my eyes fell, as though forced, upon a story of the Philosopher who said, studying one night by candle, he perceived to enter his room, through closed doors, two large old men who, after being abundantly questioned, responded that they were the inhabitants of the Moon and at the same time vanished.”

This is, of course, the beginning of the Voyage to the Moon, Cyrano’s secret book. It may be an absurd way to begin a thread on the history of universal history – a thread that I has been prefigured in my posts on Forster, and that I want to wind through a passage in the Grundrisse and a bit of The anti-Oedipus – but I, too, like to support burlesque beliefs with quasi-serious arguments. One of the beliefs that goes back on this blog to the very beginning of my human limit thesis is that the Great Transformation couldn’t have occurred without the discovery of America. One of the great intellectual themes of the seventeenth century was a coming to terms with the New World – that is, with a world that looked unexpectedly, and in fact totally, different from what had once been supposed. It was not only the earth, of course, that had become a New World, but New Worlds were being found by the astronomers – by Kepler and Galileo, for instance – which Cyrano knew well. He had probably seen the map of the moon made by his friend Gassendi.

Cyrano’s burlesque remark is one of the ancestors of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and the Marxist method, said the up to now silent bystander. And look, look! See how the moment of similarity in which two antitheses mirror each other, becoming each for the other what the other is for each - the seed out of which they evolve a different course of development – out of similars, differences – is sealed or signed, as it were, by a magically opened page of Cardan, the alchemist and astrologer.

Spinoza takes a hit

I’m surprised that this sad, sad blow to Spinoza’s reputation hasn’t been spinning around the theory blogs. I’m talking, of course, of Sarkozy’s endorsement of Spinoza. This is from Le Monde’s (excellent) literary blog (written by Pierre Assouline), reporting on Sarkozy’s speech at Nimes:


le président veut encourager le tournage des films en Corse, et réhabiliter Spinoza aux dépens de Descartes. Si si, “le” Spinoza, non sans avoir précisé pour nous éclairer sur cette initiative ébouriffante :”l’intelligence humaine est avant tout le produit des émotions, et ce serait une très grave erreur de centrer les enseignements sur les disciplines cérébrales en marginalisant celles qui font appel à l’intelligence des émotions et à l’intelligence du corps“. Il n’y a pas à dire, la France est vraiment le pays de l’exception culturelle.

“… the president wants to encourage the making of films in Corsica, and to rehabilitate Spinoza against Descartes. Yes yes yes, ‘the’ Spinoza, not without having presented for our enjoyment enlightening details of this astonishing initiative: “human intelligence is before everything else the product of emotions, and it would be a grave error to center our pedagogy on cerebral disciplines in marginalizing those which make an appeal to the intelligence of the emotions and the body.” What can you say? France is truly the land of exceptional culture.”

The politics and anthropology of happiness

LI promised in a previous post to outline Forster’s little read essay, “The relation of the art of the state and the happiness of mankind”, written in Paris in 1793.

As we pointed out, Forster begins on a satiric note: he points to Russia’s justification of its recent conquest of Poland as motivated by concern for the “happiness” of the people, and remarks that all political arrangements seem, now, to base themselves on the happiness of the people. But what is happiness? And is there such a thing as the happiness of the people, or even happiness of mankind?

“But in what does the happiness consist which one wants so industriously to serve up to the human race? Common sense binds a concept with the word and I don’t know what general feeling transforms it into the object of the striving of all of those who are of one origin and similar education with us. Habituated from youth onward to regard the circumstance of comfort and the consciousness of pleasant impressions as basic, or with other words, to believe that an existence which can distinguish between enjoyment and pain could only be born for the first, we gradually develop an idea of that wished for way to be, in which the accumulation of pleasant impressions not only tops the accumulation of unpleasant ones, but also, through their changes and manifoldness, brings into our path continually new charms, and open up in us new sources of sentiment. Can we provisionally apply this definition? Then we may mention, for example, the happiness of the situation of the English tenant famer, and the misery of the Polish serf. Surely the prosperous man, who enjoys all the superfluity of his fat acres and meadows, is well clothed, and in a nice, clear house with handsome conveniences, at the same time in the prospect of his mind, of his feelings, of his principles, his meditations, his stock of knowledge, with a word, as a human, is the one with the widest advantages. He is easy in all his relationships, and in this comfortable situation he looks about himself, investigates who, from whom and to what end he is, gives thus the best part of himself, his reason, which elevates him over all of visible creation, its purposive development, and begins, to be conscious of his human value. The enervated slave of the sarmatian nobleman, on the contrary, in a decayed, smoky, naked hut, in dirty sheepskin, half eaten up by vermin, in his heavy as his lighter work, an his not completely unhealthy diet, knows simply animal affects, rests without a thought from his strivings, and dies without having tasted the higher enjoyment of the senses, without having enjoyed his mental powers or only knowing them in order to completely delude himself about the purpose of his existence. “

One notes that the question of happiness quickly moves from the psychological, in the above passage, to the anthropological. The psychological seems not to offer sufficient information to decide the question – after all, the question is not just about the greater number of pleasant as opposed to unpleasant sensations, but what, exactly, makes one sensation pleasant and another unpleasant – which is why Forster moves to scenes of happiness, as though comparing two prints. Of course, Forster has seen both the English tenent farmer and the Polish serf - the latter when teaching in Livonia. Within the classical vocabulary of the character, Forster shifts to the modern sociology of types – the English tenant farmer vs. the Polish serf – and then to their social environments. In good enlightenment fashion, what we seem to want to find, to answer the question of the happiness of the people, is a universal. But the different circumstances under which the free English farmer and the chained Polish agricultural worker exist make it hard to find a universal maker. Happiness, as a universal, seems to flatten out here – in which case the art of the state that creates the conditions in which the two types live will get no guidance from the principle of happiness.

Forster puzzles over this point. In a sense, he shifts the question of happiness, at this point, from the pleasant impression – the animal condition for happiness – to consciousness of human value. To make the point that happiness is bound up with the cultural conditions of mankind, he procedes to make a comparison between Europe and China. His notion is that, in one way or another, a state does create the conditions under which human beings strive for happiness. Make those conditions miserable enough and the striving for happiness will never reach the human level. Forster’s nightmare vision of China as a vast totalitarian kingdom of pain and poverty is drawn, then, as a systematic contrast to Europe. The system of government there seeks to anaesthetize forever the capacity for perfection (Vervollkommnungsfaehigkeit) in its subjects. To do this, they preach the unchangeability of all social relations, unconditioned obedience to the orders of the state, blind belief in every doctrine of the state. Thus, the Chinese government has pampered into existence unnatural things – Unarten – after millennia of despotism. (Perhaps this is a reference to the eunuchs of the palace).

“Perhaps one might ask: if in Europe a system of government like the Chinese one comes into power, would the consequences be the same? Our higher development, our deeply probing research of the truth, our speculations about the limits of our existence, our knowledge that has become so vast due to our trade and seafaring, our useful sciences, our arts elevated to the highest purposiveness, our taste, our manners, our bodily advantages – must they not blaze such a path, that all the advantages of the best alimentation of the human race are joined with the care for moral stability? Who can decide, what series of millennia, what eccentric movements, what pauses, in brief, what revolutions must have prepared the present mechanisms of the human race in east Asia?”

Using these cultural examples, Forster is developing a method for his anthropology, in which the condition of the people – for instance, the animal existences into which the Chinese peasantry are forced – mirrors the intentions of the state. Yet the state, in Forster’s scheme, doesn’t simply shape the people out of shapeless material. Accidents and nature count. Europeans, for instance, are more lively and inquisitive than the Chinese due to their racial type and their geography, evidenced by trade and seafaring. This is not, by the way, the view of China that had prevailed in enlightened circles. And it begins, or stands near the beginning, of a colonialist discourse that will revel in drawing the scene of Asiatic despotism to highlight European freedom.

If we put Forster’s claims in the perspective of the question of happiness, we see two things: one is that happiness is a more complex matter than we first thought. It is a form of perfecting the human, not just an accumulation of pleasant over unpleasant impressions. This movement away from the naïve hedonism of the dying libertine strain in the eighteenth century is not peculiar to Forster: one finds it everywhere (Smith’s sympathy, the fashion for the sentimental, etc., etc.). More interesting, perhaps, is the second thing: whereas Forster begins by asking, implicitly, if the “governors” [Regenten] can bring about human happiness, he shifts to making happiness the chief, or even the only bond between the government and the people. To speak of the happiness of the people isn’t just a fashion indulged in by eighteenth century princes: without happiness, the conjunction between the governed and the governors is wholly accidental. Without happiness, the governors are revealed as simply robbers. This, Forster insinuates, is what the French revolution has been about – the creation of a necessary bond between the governors and the people. In consequence, we must destroy a whole line of statecraft, a certain wisdom of Realpolitik that runs through the 17th and 18th century, summed up in a anecdote from Choiseul, Louis XV’s minister, who told a courtier once, “you are a good man, but you will never be a good statesman. You do not despise the people enough.”

For Forster, the government of contempt does positively act upon the happiness of the people:

“Unholy cruel contempt for humanity! It is this that eternalizes the sad phenomena of ignorance and slavery among the masses, when it first lifted the ambitious [Ehrgeizigen] over their equals. And now they dare, to call to witness their own handiwork? Over the current state of the species, the philosopher and the politician agree; but he feels either wise, about what men could or should be; he reveals the causes of their degradation, and seeks out the means that can help them approach once again their real definition.”

This, of course, is the key to the connection between happiness as the perfection of man and equality. In the politics of contempt, the people’s happiness is taken to be a different thing from the happiness of the ruler. The rulers are wise so that their subjects are ignorant, and strive for wealth so that their subjects can be content with little.

AND CONTINUING THIS:

The rest of Forster’s article is, in a sense, a sort of reply to Burke that takes another path than that of Paine. Where Paine’s objection is based in the universal rights of man, Forster agrees, tacitly, with Burke that the foundations of power require an order such tht the first task of the art of the state is to bring about that order. This is the terrible power of the French revolution – it puts into question the very order of the principalities of Europe. Forster presents a dilemma: either the governing class is telling the truth about governing for the happiness of the subjects or they are not. If they are telling the truth, what kind of order do they propose to make their subjects happy? And what image of happiness is mirrored in that order? And if they are not telling the truth, then how can the governing class of a particular time object to being dispossessed by other predators?

The effect making the ground of the legitimation of order the advancement of happiness is profound. In the instant that this is accepted, a light is cast on the bond between the princes and the people, and a question can be asked: is this bond necessary? Does it arise out of the people themselves? There is, in a sense, no Burkian escape route – the call upon tradition, upon the grace of life, doesn’t give us the necessary connection between the governed and the governors which would justify the governed having any loyalty to the governors. The people who break into your house and throw a party may be as gracious and beautiful as you like – but that doesn’t answer the question of what they are doing in your house.

In the disconnection of the upper class (hoheren Stande), in the impossibility of setting limits to their presumption, their power, their influence, lies the seed of destruction of the great kingdoms. So fell the Roman Empire in the East and the West, and so must every hegemonic power collapse, which isn’t based on the oriental mechanism of unchanging class and castes.”

Forster has before ascribed this state to a revolution. Now he drives the point home – only a revolution could freeze into place a state of affairs in which human reason, which really exists – in fact, exists universally – is, as it were, suspended or curtailed.

‘The politics of the European princes thus brings about the opposite of the harmony in which finally everything must be merged; far from providing the basis for the peace of the human race, they eternalize his revolutions; far from distributing the general happiness, they cannot guard the ruling dynasties themselves before the most self-centered changes of happiness. Great personal properties may make an exception here; yet how seldom these turn out to be nothing, and how fleeting is their appearance! How dangerous it has so often been to the boldly striving princes, this simple proposal to rule alone. How quickly in the end collapse these foundationless buildings under a weak successor, which were built up into towers by his greater predecessors all too quickly and grandly, more to serve his own phantasy than to last!’

Bernhard - attacked

The lovegermanbooks blog (yes, as in the niches for sexual tastes in Fourier’s utopia, in the world of blogging, every obsession and interest must eventually find its blogger) there was a reference to Maxim Biller’s review of Thomas Bernhard’s posthumously published book, My Prizes. In the U.S., from time to time, fights erupt about snark in reviews. The New Republic and the Atlantic both try to sneak a little gunpowder in their usual reviews of fiction – although in the Atlantic’s case, the hatchet man, B.R. Meyers, is so unbelievably tasteless that he is continually blowing himself up, and leaving his targets unscathed.

But Germany is undergoing something weird, lately. Call it the Lady Bitch Ray phenomena: insult, cacophony and obscenity have become a much larger part of the staid German scene.

This is the first paragraph of Biller’s review:

“The asshole Thomas Bernhard, and I say this, although I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, the asshole Bernhard has almost certainly only written one single good book. This book has just now appeared, although he wrote it already in 1980, and it shows, what kind of asshole he was, and perhaps he didn’t want that, for it appears, as long as he was still alive – and if I wanted to, I could go on in this sleep inducing, saying-everything-and-nothing Thomas Bernhard tone endlessly, because nothing is simpler than to write like this, I think, thoughtlessly adding one sentence to another, mere sentences, that are alike and yet always just a little bit different, then exactly like this is the way they appear in the head of the writer by writing, and if one is named, say, Isaac Babel or Junot Diaz, one finally seeks to chose out the best of these so very similar sentences, but that is naturally more work, as simply writing down all of these sentences, like Thomas Bernhard, buy which the reader can pick them out for himself.”

Who doesn’t revere Bernhard? But it is hard not to laugh at Biller’s parody. And of course Biller is here putting on the style of the gunslinger writer. He may be irritated, too, as he has had a hard time, himself, with the combination of asshole and literature, since a novel of his was banned by the court on behalf of a former lover and her mother, who, they charged, suffered from having their privacy invaded by Biller. Such a law would wipe out literature, but I believe it was a Southern German court, maybe Bavarian. And what can you expect?

Here’s the second paragraph. It makes sense, coming from a man who has been bruised by the court. Although there is something narrow about Biller’s idea that writing is a form of assault that should be judged on how severely it injures its target. But I do like a good rugby scramble:

And if one even like the great, dirty, provincial Austrian german Asshole Bernhard insults here a painter, politician, writer as a giant asshole and there a city as provincial and uncultured and Austrian or german, then one has so to speak the readers on one’s side, who believe that they themselves are not uncultured provincial Austrian or German assholes, thus all, thus even the Austrians, thus even the Germans and the most important thing is, not to underpin his hatred with arguments and to ground with grounds, as the blustery growly opportunistic coffee house loudmouth Thomas Bernhard cleverly also never did, then otherwise someone might have felt really hit by him and not simply literarily mentioned and flattered, and even correctly, and then the Superhypocrite Bernhard had never counted between Flensburg and Linz as a Superwriter, and as never happens to the editions of the German poets and thinkers, I guess, to fundamentally assemble their people and put their life-lies in question, etc. But I don’t care, and thus I will, a not so German poet and thinker, try to explain, why I can’t stand Thomas Bernhard, and do so on the occasion of what is certainly his only good book. And to succeed, I must first explain the reason that it is good.”

My prizes contain the story of the prizes that Bernhard received, and what he thought about the whole process – that it was shit. But, Biller says, the stories as Bernhard tells them are not high literary and Bernhardian, but resemble the stories of a schlemiel – he doesn’t say that last bit, but that is what it sounds like. And of course Bernhard is telling stories about himself – how, on a panel to award a prize, when he suggested Canetti, another judge said, well, he was a Jew – and Bernhard didn’t say anything. As Biller shows, he was a go-alonger, a mitlaufer, he never spoke up, he shook hands, he listened to idiot speeches, he gave idiot speeches. He needed the money. Biller is very scoriating about Bernhard’s sugar-momma – although Biller oversteps the persona he is building for himself by so doing, even though he compares Bernhard to Haider, who also had a sugarmomma, apparently. They also both had ten fingers and both had penises. The evidence couldn’t be more obvious! Let’s measure his neck for the rope. Etc.

Not convincing about Bernhard, but at least one is convinced that this is a man who knows what he hates in literature, and – unlike the dreary Meyer of the Atlantic, with his ninth grade English teacher style – knows how to create literature out of what he hates in literature. Sometimes, anarchist’s rule no. 1, you just gotta blow something the fuck up.

Marx and Forster

“Post history is inhabited by men who believe in “good causes”, in “man”, in “society”, in many other hypostases. But, it is ruled by a mocking (and perhaps transcendental) being for whom all is material, interchangeable, exploitable – a perpetual manipulator who invents forms and throws them away, who quickly tires of common materials and is always looking for untried ones, who excavates the rain forest of the Amazon and drills pack ice to add flavor, an exotic aroma, to the kykeon, the broth served in the Mysteries.” Roberto Calasso, The Ruins of Karsch, 249

In the chapter on History Experiments, Calasso makes a run at the great theoretician of “universal history”, the moment when man overthrows god – the theoretician named Marx. Marx is the most explicit exponent, Calasso thinks, of the modern moment, which consists of the recognition that there are no limits to man’s domination over the world. This is the moment of universal solidarity. And whether it is the capitalist system or whether a socialist system succeeds it, whether the working class seizes the means of production or simply seizes the occasion to demand fatter retirement benefits, underlying the Marxist schema is the overthrow of the human limit. We are become as gods, and the gods fall shrieking, then, to the earth, and end up in full length Disney cartoons, to finish their weary existences.

“Marx speaks of post history when he mentions the passage from ‘history’ to ‘universal history’ – an experimental phase of history in which everything forms a single body, in which nothing is external to society and everything acts on everything else, as in the resonant primordial cosmos. Its empirical foundation is the world market, since this market is an escape – an exit with no possibility of return – from Borniertheit, from local narrowness. The world market reinvents a kind of fate (just as post history in general reactivates all the archaic categories, which now apply to a reality that inverts the one in which they were created).”

LI was just going to translate some of Georg Forster’s essay, but we first wanted to draw a line, show that Forster is part of a “stem family”, to use the sociological term for a nuclear family over a number of generations of descent, in which one finds Marx too. From the world circumnavigator to the prophet of universal history, things line up with an eerie symbolic and mythic resonance, as though we were dealing with the fates indeed. Not only, of course, would Marx have been aware of the revolutionary generation of Germans – that small band – but Hegel was, of course, vividly aware of Forster, partly by reason of Caroline Micahaelis. That woman, like one of the princesses of Priam’s house, made her long way from the fall of Mainz to the center of German intellectual life, in Jena, in the 1790s, where she sat in Schlegel’s household, conversed with Novalis, and kept in mind the things that she had learned at Forster’s table – by her own account, the commencement of her political education –before divorcing Schlegel and becoming Schelling’s wife. Hegel, in fact, lived with Schelling and her for a year – lived in their house. And surely at some point the death of Forster in Paris, and his “errors”, as the Humboldts put it – verirrte Forster, the man who erred, the traveler whose meanderings didn’t form a coherent journey in the eyes of the shocked, retreating bourgeoisie, Caroline’s ugly man of private failures – who would know more what went down in Mainz than her? and public sublimity – must have arisen as a case for those Jena intellectuals.

And from Forster:

“The happiness of mankind is, according to the assurances of the Governors, the constant goal of their patriarchal concern. The most recent manifesto of the conqueror of the Poles breathes out this spirit and is guided only by this speech. I will not in any way cast doubt on its sincerity here. The confusion of turns of speech, as I have said in another place, is of course great enough; only on the words – happiness, truth, virtue, have our leaders now invested too much to seek whether they can help themselves without them entirely. Without this would the right of the Strong soon be a much too shaky prop for their domination. Even the robber’s final goals are quiet possession and enjoyment. If he finds the means, with his booty to return from out of the cave into the bosom of bourgeois society – don’t you think that he would end up presenting himself as the most jealous defender of its rights, as the strictest revenger of injured property? Anyway, penetrate the history of all revolutions, or for example only the most recent ones, and look how the jealousy of all the quickly succeeding parties, as soon as they grasp the ruder of the state, loudly rejects the bold revolutionary means by which they have made the people the instrument of their victory, preaching in favor of order, peace, obedience to the laws and immunity for persons and property – after the raging tribunals, the slanders, the accusations, the legal murders, the plunderings had set in motion the sacred insurrection.”

The Reindustrialization Bank of America

Unfortunately, the reporting about Obama’s ‘stimulus” in the Press has concentrated overwhelmingly on the price tag. This is the kind of thing that is catnip to the economists, who love a number and a model the way a kitten loves a ball of yarn. It is also a way of shirking the occasion. No number will bind up the economy. No number will produce out of its pocket the road back from the abyss for the U.S, still the most powerful nation in the world. The abyss is not just getting fewer video games for the kids at Christmas. It involves a worldwide environmental crisis, as well as a nationally limited one – the drought in the West – that is getting bigger every year. It involves a worldwide cultural crisis, as thirty years of dumbing have put us all on the day shift of endless pantysniffing idiocy, strangling the capacity to daydream and replacing it with various forms of porno. It involves the decline and fall of the war system – Hitler’s triumph, the system has been used for sixty years in the developed countries (as well as the U.S.S.R) as the economic stimulus of first resort, the prosperity of which served to buffer the population that gained from it from feeling the traditional reach of the wars that were directed against less fortunate populations.

The list of projects included in this article by James Galbraith, who has been reliably clearsighted about the problem of predator capitalism, is a great place to start putting faces on the -000000000000 numbers. Here’s a selection:

The industrial crisis requires immediate action if the auto companies are to survive. For such cases in the future (and there probably will be some) the relevant precedent is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, headed during the New Deal by an intrepid businessman, Jesse Jones, who saved many important companies with a combination of loans and workout plans. A new RFC would enable the federal government to assist industries– perhaps not as large, not as essential, or as threatening as the collapse of the automobile industry would be — but on a somewhat systematic basis for the duration of the crisis.
As for helping the workers who are most severely affected by the industrial aspects of this crisis, Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economics the New School, has proposed a simple and effective step that would further the cause of universal health care: reduce the age of Medicare eligibility to the age of 55. That would take much of the cash burden of healthcare costs off of enterprises, where they don’t belong anyway. And it would provide the opportunity for many workers who would like to retire but won’t do so because they can’t afford to lose their health insurance.
The housing crisis requires mortgage abatement, a resetting of the toxic adjustable rate mortgages already being initiated through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and also a concerted effort out in the neighborhoods to restructure mortgages and to keep people in their homes. Here the historical model is the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which did this in the 1930’s — an enterprise that took about 20,000 people to manage 1 million mortgages. Essentially the same effect could be achieved today by buying back the mortgages through Fannie and Freddie and then turning them over to a restructuring facility – the present version is known as the H4H, or Hope for Homeowners program.
The point is that while you cannot effectively stabilize the price of housing, you can try to save the existing housing stock, stop the spread of blight, the abandonment of homes, and the homelessness that results from an unchecked wave of foreclosures. We will then have preserved those neighborhoods and those communities for a better day.

The great mistake of the boys of October was not just in approving a program that could easily be seen to be the biggest bank robbery in history, perpetrated by the CEOs of the financial system, but in not seeing the opportunity before them - given the numbers the government was willing to put up, we could easily have created a national bank, capitalized to the tune of some 700 billion dollars, that would invest in re-industrializing the U.S. True, the political fighting would be intense, as this kind of thing entails some shocking encroachments on U. of Chi school verities, and would rightly be seen by the upper 10 percentile as an erosion of their share of the national wealth. But the falling of the industrial base has since made it even more obvious that Citi was a bad investment for America. Galbraith is right to hark back to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 30s, and if such an entity had been in place in December, we could have begun to coordinate a really comprehensive response to the twin problems of a worsening dependency on oil and an American auto industry in freefall. A number of intermediate steps might have to be taken to solve these problems that would involve creating public entities ex nihilo, and then spinning them off to private investors. For instance, it just might be the case that U.S. autos could double their mileage if, as in Europe, cheap diesel fuel were available. In Europe, such fuel has long been subject to a refining process such that it is a lower emission fuel than U.S. gasoline. There is no comparable refinery capacity in the U.S., so the U.S. government should simply build one. Such would by no means be the final step towards creating a much more sensible green vehicle –hydrogen offers one path, electric rechargeable batteries another. Now is the time to pour money into R and D on all innovative engine types, so that we have the prospect of replacing the entire fleet of cars in the U.S. with green ones that can hook up to be recharged anywhere in the U.S.

At the moment, the idea of the state interfering this massively in the economy still lacks popular support. However, it doesn’t lack economic rationality. The private sector has long misallocated capital to projects with short term horizons to please equity investors. This has been a big factor in the de-manufacturing of America – which is a story not only of manufacturing jobs lost, but of big manufacturing opportunities squandered. Investors are as aware as anyone that those companies that are innovative – that show the greatest productivity growth – aren’t as profitable as those companies that are quarter to quarter beauty pageant winners. There are exceptions, like the computer industry, but one notices the shortfall in say broadband too – as opposed to, say, the abundance of I-phones. One requires heavy capital investments that will result in a slow but steadily increasing yield, the other doesn’t.

the birth of alienation from the severed head of Olympe de Gouges

The split up came violently. Three delegates, Georg Forster, Adam Lux, and Andreas Patocki, a Mainz businessman, left Mainz just before the reactionary forces took the city. Therese was already gone – she’d joined her lover with her children. Caroline Michaelis wasn’t so lucky – she and her daughter left, but were unable to get out of the area, and were forced back into the city. In the background was not only the terror in Paris, but the white terror in Frankfurt. Forster and his fellow delegates made it to Paris and settled in a hotel run by a “patriotic Dutchman” in the Rue de Moulins, close to Tuileries and the Palais Royale. “The poissarde, the women from the fish market, cried out to them according to their custom a welcome to the city, and thereby earned a tip.” (Uhlig 325) It was here that Forster met many of the other transplants in Paris, including Mary Wollstonecraft.

I like to speculate that Forster saw Olympe de Gouge’s affiches denouncing Robespierre, which were put up at the end of July, 1793. Certainly the fate of the second Mainz delegate, Adam Lux, is attached to hers – his trial followed directly upon hers in the Journees des Assemblées Nationales. He had written a defense of Charlotte Corday, whose magnificent beheading had fused together the revolutionary passions in his soul – Lux then proceeding to his own version of suicide by cop, which was to exalt Corday in a pamphlet and denounce the Convention.

These were Forster’s surroundings for his last writings – among which LI must signal Relation of the art of the State to the happiness of humankind – Beziehung der Staatskunst auf der Glück der Menschheit. Of course, by this time, the Glück der Menschheit was a cliché; yet LI is going to make the argument that this is an unjustly neglected pamphlet. In it, we see a self-conscious critique of happiness find expression from a revolutionary point of view. LI is wary of chasing after “origins” and firsts, but certainly this essay deserves a special place in our history of the rise of the happiness culture. That its genesis should be among the moderates, the Girondistes, recalls us to the re-orientation which underlies this history – one which recasts the location of the radicals, the opposition, and the establishment, draws a different line of tension, reads, we’d dare say, under the ossified categories by which we usually do our history and distribute the actors and the ideas.

I’ll translate excerpts from it in an upcoming post.

Zona report

It's all right
To be mean

The Zona report today was strong enough to flummox even the priests. On Economix, the NYT blog, economists have been invited to do their usual ritual dances – they step on the skulls of the evil greedy and lazy laborer, they pray for efficiency, they come up with irresistible reasons to give one of the class of the 10,000 richest households another million or billion. During the Zona, however, the dances begin to seem frantic. The old prayers, the old demons and heroes, seem to get out of focus. Obviously, the normal order and the full stop of all human history was 2006, a year in which everything came together – corporate profits popping, median household incomes stagnating, the great warriors freer than ever before from the bonds of the Demon Regulation and the Demon Taxman. Now, however, with every month another half a million people sliding down the chute of darkness and into the netherworld of unemployment (surely, of course, by their own choosing – in general, the proles are inexplicably lazy, and the only way to get them to work is either to beat them or to lower their wages), some of the priests are starting to Doubt. Uwe Reinholdt’s heartfelt post begins with a survey of the faith:

“If, like every university, the American Economic Association had a coat of arms, its obligatory Latin banner might read: “Est, ergo optimum est, dummodo ne gubernatio civitatis implicatur.” (”It exists, therefore it must be optimal, provided that government has not been involved.”)

With only minor injustice, one may take this as the overarching mantra to which the core of the economics profession marches. Government is accorded a beneficial role in this vision only to provide purely public goods, such as national defense; to remove private-market imperfections, such as monopoly power on either side of the market; or to deal with so-called spill-over effects from private decisions, which economists call “externalities.” These exceptions aside, unquestioned belief in the sagacity, efficiency and beneficence of private markets reigns supreme.”

Reinholdt searches about for an answer to the problem that this credo seems to have failed. He doesn’t search about with the tools of his trade, and ask whether the intimacy between economic departments and the financial services sector, into which most economics students are tidily bundled, might have had something to do with it. Instead, he turns to behavioral psychology, and in particular, groupthink. LI doesn’t wholly disagree. Self-interest is never a bedrock explanation, since the self and the interest are constructions made out of glue, routine, dreams, sweats, traffic, boredom, and exorcisms – thus the tightness of the array of economic departments and the financial services sector is needs a stronger poem to explain it. But here is Reinholdt’s theory:

“If groupthink is the cause, it most likely is anchored in what my former Yale economics professor Richard Nelson (now at Columbia University) has called a ”vested interest in an analytic structure,” the prism through which economists behold the world.

This analytic structure, formally called “neoclassical economics,” depends crucially on certain unquestioned axioms and basic assumptions about the behavior of markets and the human decisions that drive them. After years of arduous study to master the paradigm, these axioms and assumptions simply become part of a professional credo. Indeed, a good part of the scholarly work of modern economists reminds one of the medieval scholastics who followed St. Anselm’s dictum “credo ut intellegam“: “I believe, in order that I may understand.”

An inference drawn from the profession’s credo is that private markets invariably are self-correcting and are driven by rational human beings whose careful decisions serve to allocate scarce resources efficiently — that is, these decisions maximize a nebulous thing economists call “social welfare.”

“Social welfare” on this view is thought to increase when those who gain from a change in the economy — e.g., a corporate restructuring or deregulation of the financial sector or increased foreign trade — gain more from the change than those who lose from it, even if the gainers had already been wealthy before the change and the losers poor. Thus, few economists were troubled by the explosion of executive compensation on Wall Street or elsewhere in corporate America. It was just the efficient market at work, rewarding these executives for the “value” they were creating.”

What does LI see here? Is it a perception, however distant, of the mangle of inequality? Oh that mangle, how it throbs in the background of the Zona! It is, of course, too sacred and awful to approach directly – after all, it might be that the mangle is producing us as we write! It could be the dreamer that dreams our dream!

“As far as diagnoses of economic trends and predictions about the future are concerned, the profession’s preferred analytic structure and the groupthink it begets might work superbly well on planet Vulcan, whence hails the utterly logical Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame.”

This, of course, show that even in the dark night of the soul, the priests still believe. They believe they have the keys to heaven and hell. What they call rational is rational, what they call irrational is irrational, let heaven and earth fade away. On the planet Vulcan, in a pleasingly closed system, their poems work! LI, however, must dissent. They were sold bogus keys by hucksters, what they call rational and irrational aren’t descriptions of the mind’s superb adapting to circumstances, but instead, looked at closely, are actually mummies, tightly wrapped and deoxidized, discovered under the Chicago pyramids in 1898, and no system depending on the AEA’s pube Manichianism will last for any length of time on any planet you care to name.

As for my prediction - oh reader, no bone will be unplucked by the Zona! Including yours and mine.

Queen of the fern

What becomes a legend best? This was the hook of an old furrier advertising campaign, famous for showing Liliane Hellman in a mink stole. But the hook deserves a better fate than to go to advertising heaven in a chorus of skinned weasels. For what becomes a legend best is a bad end, which is what happened to Olympe de Gouges, that fabulous existence, the bastard daughter of a seller of used clothes and – so she claimed – one of the great 18th century literary talents, although she named no names. Others claimed Louis XV. In fact, Gouges’ downfall was due to her strenuous and heroic advocacy for Louis Capet, who she was by no means willing to see led to the guillotine. Was this an act of sisterly sympathy? No, it was the common sense of genius. As the anarchist Malatesta said, a century later, far better kill a chicken than a king, for at least you can eat a chicken. Which is pretty much the definitive argument against all capital punishment, if you ask me.

How is a woman of such doubtful origins not to get lost in the bog? It is another case of the encounter of the third life and the adventurer’s character. She started out marrying a rich merchant when she was merely 15 – an unusually young age in a country where the average age of marriage for someone of Gouges’ class was twenty five. She was more than fortunate, though, in her marital choice – not only did they have a child right away, but the rich merchant conveniently died, like an inconvenient secondary in one of Angela Carter’s fairy tales. One of her biographers – Lairtuilliers – claims that she was particularly adept at the game of decamptivos – like Lotte’s game in Sorrows of Young Werther, a surprisingly crude and childish affair. It consisted of someone, elected to be King of the Fern, saying decamptivos – which would make all guests, who were grouped into couples, scatter out of sight. They had to stay out of sight for fifteen minutes. If they were late coming back, the king would fine them. Of course, one assumes the fifteen minutes were spent in kissing and groping, but just putting off and putting off clothes would take enough time to make more extensive sex unlikely.

Lairtuillier includes an almost unbelievable claim – except that everything about Olympe is quasi-unbelievable:

“But she had not yet arrive at that stormy phase in her life, and it was necessary that before that time, another demon took hold of her: that of letters. I can affirm, writes M. Dulaure in the Sketches, that madame de Gouges, author of novels and plays, did not know how to read or write, and dictated her productions to her secretaries. “They never taught me anything,” she says somewhere; raised in the countryside, where French was badly spoken, I didn’t know the principles; I didn’t know anything, and I made a trophy of my ignorance; I dictated with my soul, never with my mind. The natural seal of genius is on all of my productions.” The public didn’t completely agree with the last part of this opinion. But we are going to see that this woman, whose vocation was so strongly marked by revolutionary crises, of whose nature it was to be all action and speech, and who seemed to be made for nothing other than mounting to the political assault, knew also, to use the expression of Sand, how to throw her soul outside herself and lend it to the heroes of the drama.” [54-55]
The idea that she couldn’t read or write is common to her story, as told by the nineteenth century historians. Michelet says the same thing, and all attribute this fact to… her own testimony. In the preface to her place, The corrected philosopher, she writes:

“I don’t have the advantage of being educated; and as I have already said, I know nothing. I will thus not take the title of author, although I have already been announced to the public by two plays which they have very well received. Thus, not being able to imitate my colleagues by either my talents or my pride, I listened to the voice of modesty which completely agrees with me.”
…
O O, but what becomes a legend most is that the legends never agree. More recent reseach has turned up quite a different story about Olympe de Gouges. A good place to start is the excerpts, taken from a biography of Guillotine, written by Henri Pigaillem, which he presents on his blog. She was the daughter of a butcher and a washerwoman, but her grandfather was wealthy enough, and the family, the Gouzes, were close to a local noble family in Montauban – Pigaillem claims that she received some training by the nuns, and it does seem unlikely that the family would have left their daughter illiterate. She married to her father’s partner at 15 and didn’t like the blessed state of matrimony, so, as in a Tom Waits ballad, she encountered a man who had to do with the riverboats and took off with him to Paris. Jacques Biétrix de Rozières. Being quite beautiful, she made use of her beauty to become a kept woman, and king of the fern be damned if she stayed the extra fifteen minutes in the shadows beyond the other players. Born Marie Gouze, she renamed herself something more pompous and personal. At thirty she decided to become a writer – and the story that she was illiterate is likely an exaggeration, for by this point she’d spent fifteen years in good, educated company. Megan Conway’s essay on Olympe de Gouges tries to sort through what is legendary and what is not about a woman who wrote forty plays, numerous fictions, and of course many pamphlets. Gouges might have received some help – she was a close friend, if not lover, of Louis-Sebastian Mercier, for instance – but she also liked to put herself on display as a Rousseau-ist type, sowing doubts about her education. Conway concludes that it is unlikely that she couldn’t read, and likely that she was at least literate, although she surely also dictated to secretaries. Conway writes that her disconcerting vanity, the way all general topics are interrupted by her particular peeves, makes it hard to read her since she was “so undeniably obnoxious.”

Olympe de Gouges, at this distance, has been wrapped in the perfumed saliva of the human rights type, who celebrate her as a feminist and ignore, as best they can, her outsider status and her fidelity to a creed laid down, she thought, by Rousseau – which might be paraphrased, via Kerouac, as first moral judgment, best moral judgment. It is extremely hard to say if she really dictated her works – surely, in 1793, it was a little difficult to find secretaries for the job – but “dictation” of a sort was certainly at the center of her pamphleting, her posters, her letters to the assembly, her violent taunting of Robespierre. What came out of her mouth was like a revelation, and she would be its prophet and martyr. She would be the Queen of the Fern in the streets of Paris in 1793. And she would die gloriously, her blood rising up to pull down and utterly destroy her murderers.
Another outsider saint.

demography and poetry

On July 4, 1793, a group of children coming from the faubourg Saint-Antoine shelter for foundlings paraded before the national convention in order to thank the deputies for the recent law that promised the principle of rights of succession to natural children. “You have shown yourself fathers in rendering to them the rights that they lost in being born in a manner one has always regarded as illegitimate,” declared the teacher of the children. “You did more: you have returned them to the social body… You have established the base of government upon equality.” In a few words, in its fashion, the Convention gave body to its promise. The astonishing and controversial law of 12 brumaire Year II (2 November 1793) accorded to illegitimate children, when they were recognized by their parents, rights of succession equal to those of legitimate children. The same law implicitly suppressed the customary right which permitted single mothers or their progeniture to petition for action in recognition of paternity in order to obtain a food pension.” - Susan Desan, What is a father? Illegitimacy and paternity of the Civil Code of Year II, Annales, 57:4 935.

So far, LI’s discussion of the issue of free love seems to follow the plot lines of various nests of gentle folks. In particular, the romantic movement in Germany as well as in England seems, when one examines it, an astonishingly close knit affair, with almost all participants being at one to two degrees separation from each other. It is this closeness which makes the history of German literature during its classical period seem so very much like a People magazine article about marriages and divorces among today’s young stars. It is a “small world” network. And yet, of course, it is operating in a much larger world – that Georg Forster ends up dying in Revolutionary Paris, writing his fascinating defenses of the French Revolution as a sort of embodiment, on the social plane, of physical laws (nobody at the time was more fascinated by the transfer of the term revolution from physics to society), connects, by one degree of separation, a generation of South Sea exploration, Tahiti, Captain Cook, and the extreme limit of the older form of imperialism to the new order with startling abruptness – it is by their degrees of separation that the poetry of social history is made by its unconscious agents.

In order to breath, however, LI has to periodically refocus. We’ve chosen free love as an ideology in the making, and love and suicide as two expressions of it, in order to bring us close to the conflicts that went into the birth and development of the culture of happiness. Of course, the participants did not think of themselves as particularly contesting happiness. Only in retrospect does one see how they diverged – as though separated by magic, magnetic fingers – from the bourgeois main. But that main itself was certainly involved in the wreck of the ancien regime – or one might say that it came through the fire as a new creature entirely. No salamander – but something more like a phoenix.

Desan rightly points out the conjunction of a seemingly progressive reform coupled with the collateral casualty suffered by a traditional usage – a “superstition”, if you will. Desan found that the implementation of the law, in fact, was rare – she used the Calvados department as her data base – and its terms confusing. LI suspects that the law is not only to be associated with the Terror, but to the strange rise, towards the end of the 18th century, in illegitimate births, coupled with the ‘dechristianization” of death that Paul Veyne has pointed out – orienting points that hint at a largescale collapse of beliefs across Europe.

Things fall apart.

- Edvard Munch, Death of Marat



According to no less an authority than Josiah Royce, to understand the philosophy of Schelling, one must understand Caroline Michaelis, his wife. In 1792, when she joined Therese Huber’s household, she was still Caroline Boehmer, recently widowed. Already August Wilhelm Schlegel was obsessed with her – and already she felt herself puzzingly superior to him, an intuition she was never to overcome. Later, after the occupation by the French and the counter-occupation by the forces of reaction, later, after Therese had fled to Strassbourg (which is when, apparently, she wrote Georg that she was leaving him for Hubner), after Georg left for Paris and received the condemnation of almost the entire German intelligentsia (poor mistaken Forster, Wilhelm Humboldt signed), and that after Therese might have written Caroline a letter giving her a green light for Caroline’s own affair with Georg, after the pregnancy with the unknown father, probably a French office, after being released from Mainz and exiled from her native town of Gottingen as a danger to morals and public order, she would be ‘rescued’ by Schlegel and cozened, cozening herself, into an loveless marriage, which broke up on the rocks when she finally met the man she did love, the young philosopher, Schelling. Caroline, it seems, spread her own version of what happened between Therese and Georg.

This pattern of split ups, rumor, and leftist politics is going to fasten to free love from the revolutionary period onward. The great charge against free love is its fissility – just as the great charge made against bourgeois love, from the standpoint of free love, is its creeping dissolution of the amorous impulse, which decays in the acids of repetition and over-familiarity. They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad. Love loses its courage, that side of its character that is a perpetual test. The family withdraws into its comforts, loses its curiosity and generosity, becomes fasco-tropic. Or as Shelley puts it later in the Notes on Queen Mab:

“Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.

How long then ought the sexual connection to last? what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgement should that law be considered which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object.
The state of society in which we exist is a mixture of feudal savageness and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the sole end of the science of ethics, as of all other sciences; and that the fanatical idea of mortifying the flesh for the love of God has been discarded. I have heard, indeed, an ignorant collegian adduce, in favour of Christianity, it's hostility to every worldly feeling!*
But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits.”

If we spread the deck of cards, circa 1793 to 1893, what houses do we see? The Forsters, the Shelley-Owens, the Herzens. Oda Krohg-Hans Jaeger. The Przybyszewskas. Blok-Bely.

...
Love generates two overlapping and yet contradictory semiotic fields. In one field, love is the essence of liberty. “Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty” wrote Shelley – variations of the same phrase are doubtlessly to be found in the letters of the whole generation of romantic writers. All other choices are determined, more or less, by need. Love, though, is the very angel of free will, bursting forth from the casements of the heart in one spontaneous moment, sword upraised. Love in this field, then, is the opposite of need, and those things which bear the mark of need, either physical or social, are either ignored or subsumed in the presence of true love. Both sex and money fall under this law. If we confine ourselves to this field, we could say that free love aligns itself in perfect opposition to the old libertinism, the old eighteenth century materialism. That free love demands the free giving and taking of sexual delight by no means affects this anti-sensual and anti-social turn. In the eighteen century, the sexual arrangements of the great aristocrats gradually flowed into the great bourgeois households and opinions, but they brought forth romantic love, as the enemy of that calculation, of that agreeableness – and beyond that, the antithesis of libertinism, free love.

On the other hand, another semiotic field folds over the one of liberty. “Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness”, Shelley also wrote. The old story is that love does not come out from the heart as the central identifying act – it has, instead, an exterior power all its own, and imposes itself. If this is freedom, it is a freedom that gravitates to metaphors of captivity. If in this field, the beloved isn’t necessary the way satisfying a sexual appetite is necessary, this is because the beloved exists in a space beyond physical necessity. This second field plays around the edges of the first one, and out of the interference between the two there gradually emerges images not of the angel of sex, but of the vampire, the femme fatale.

a humble suggestion for a whole new model of Value at Risk

- Alfred Kubin

Sunday’s article by Joe Nocera about the rise and apparent fall of Values at Risk models, which were used by banks, hedgefunds, ponzi schemes and assorted big and little fish, as well as their captive regulators, to justify mad and bad leverage, has caused a lot of commenting on the financial blogs – Yves Smith, hat treasure, provided, as usual, the hectoring chorus, with that radiant skepticism which always sets apart the Wall Street dissident from the usual greed jughead, seeing in Nocera’s simplifications that cool anaesthesia of conventional wisdom which, at the moment, is the way the financial press has been self-medicating itself. It is a story that will no doubt stretch on for years – the story of how everything will return to what it used to be after a few knobs are pushed, a few wires are connected.

The model talk is, to an extent, disingenuous, dancing around the question of whether we would really want a financial system that sucks up such appreciable amounts of capital for the purpose of making a very few people very rich. The financial system is, at best, built upon rents – in itself, it adds little to the prospects of humankind. And, of course, when it swells into a force similar to that which has poisoned our culture and way of life since the early nineties, no small benefit it adds will balance the barbarization that it produces, the insect like calculation it introduces into every crevice and hole of our lives. Teaching the insects to enjoy the insecticide is, of course, an old rule in elite governance, but there are limits!

However, instead of a model that takes transforms non-linear processes into a pleasingly single number, good to use over the whole portfolio of security instruments, LI would suggest that Wall Street look to literature for a better model. Most notably, Balzac’s story of the Peau de Chagrin. Chagrin is usually translated as Wild ass – The Wild Ass’s skin is George Saintsbury’s translation. It is a story ripped from today’s headlines, so to speak. Raphael, the protagonist, is a young man who has lived so largely that he is now bankrupt. One day, thinking about suicide, he goes into an antiquary’s shop and finds a skin, upon which is printed, in Sanskrit, the following message:

“Possessing me thou shalt possess all things, but they life is mine, for God has so willed it. Wish, and they wishes shall be fulfilled; but measure they desires, according to the life that is in thee. This is thy life, with each wish I must shrink, even as they own days. Wilt thou have me? Take me. God Will hearken unto thee. So be it.”

Which means, basically, that every wish shrinks the talisman, and every diminishment of the talisman diminishes the number of days left to the wisher. The wishes, the shrinkage, and death will all combine in one moment. The antiquary, of course, tries to warn Raphael from his own exotic experience (“Yes, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all the languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father’s corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab’s tent on the security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital in Europe, and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams”), but of course Raphael is not to be moved by the cautiousness of an earlier generation.

Well, the U.S. economy has been one enormous Peau de chagrin. And last autumn we decided to re-write the contract, wish back the wishes. It is as if one of the wishes could be to make the talisman grow back again. But this is the limit of the contract. One can’t contract to enjoy the wishes and then wish that the conditions be changed. They go together. The rule of talismans are impervious to the chiseling of logicmongers and traders. We watch the traders hang on, though, hang on and on to their precious skins. One more wish. Bring back the effortless profits! The bonuses! Seize the money from somewhere! Bring on the dancing, captive economists, let them predict good times!

"Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. The remains of any
substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that
we do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature."

"Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," Raphael began,
half embarrassed, "but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be
stretched?"

"Certainly----oh, bother!----" muttered M. Lavrille, trying to stretch
the talisman. "But if you, sir, will go to see Planchette," he added,
"the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will certainly discover
some method of acting upon this skin, of softening and expanding it."

the revolution of ugly men

Events in Mainz in 1792 (continuing the thread broken off before I went to mexico)

In 1792, Georg Forster had ended up in Mainz, a city in Hesse. The region had become a conflict zone between the French revolutionary armies and the various armies of the coalition formed under the terms of the Brunswick manifesto, to rescue the ancien regime, i.e. the house of Bourbon.

Forster was overworked as the head of the archive and library. At the beginning of 1792, he had not taken a public political stance, although in private letters he expressed a clear sympathy for the Jacobins. He was hiding from his wife Therese the exact extent of his indebtedness, which was crushing – Georg Forster was never a prudent man when it came to cash.

Therese seems to have been emotionally and intellectually of the left. Geiger, her biographer, in 1909, found this so scandalous that he tried to mitigate it by claiming that Therese was Forster’s ‘pupil’. It was far more likely she was his comrade. This marriage and its failure has attracted a host of commentators who have puzzled themselves over the fact that Therese left Georg for another man, and yet the two seemed to rely on each other even after the separation. The solution – that their sexual incompatibility did not hinder their affinity with each other on the basic level of friendship – seems too shocking to propose – especially for those who want to tell a story of betrayal. But Therese seems to have cared for Georg, although she didn’t love him.

The man she did love was Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, a Prussian official and intimate of Schiller. Therese met Huber through Forster, in 1788. In 1790, Huber was living with the married couple. Therese was moving in a direction taken by her mother – who lived with her lover in the house of her husband:

We stood in a doubtful relationship one to another for 1 ½ years. In the beginning I pushed him away, everything now came together, he wanted to forget [his relationship to his fiancé, Dorothea Stock], and a miserable doctor pulled him away from the border of the grave. The noble, humane Forster saw a lot in the young man, drew him nearer, I became used to him, he saw me for a year and went through all the gradation of feeling, my unhappiness strengthened my love for him – although I though of none – finally circumstances offered a hand. I don’t know in which moment, before we could guess ourselves, he had exposed to me his relationship with that girl. I pondered the thing and found decisively the result: he must confess to her that he didn’t love her any more, that time had changed his feeling, that he had no more rights upon her heart. … “ As Therese says, it took 2 ½ years for Huber to come to this point.

Some biographers have said that Therese Huber used her status, when Forster was dead, to suppress much of the information about what was happening in Mainz in 1792.

If the scene was not loaded for an explosion yet – a disaffected couple, sickly children, an overworked world famous intellectual, the French revolutionary army in the area, the wife’s lover in the house – into this scene came Caroline Michaelis.
Why Therese would invite her school friend Caroline, lately widowed, to stay with the household in Mainz is a puzzle. Or perhaps it isn’t – perhaps Therese, out of fairness, wanted Georg to have a lover too. Although Georg was not sexually faithful, apparently he had sex in the approved way, with lower class girls.

Caroline was of course as strong willed as Therese. Caroline’s letters from Mainz give another account of the Forster-Huber household. It is a sign of how narrowly the circles intersect that he chief correspondent was Meyer, the writer who had been Therese’s admirer – who “took” her virginity from her, according to Therese in an ambiguous reference. Surely Caroline knew about that. Even before she went to Mainz,she had written to Meyer: “I have never depended on her friendship – among women, there can be none.”

Soon Caroline is writing in a more sympathetic way about Georg. In particular, she writes a letter linking the ugly men of the revolution – Mirabeau, ostensibly – with her own “beauteous” figure. Strikingly, Caroline “reads” herself into her situation – which has forever been the subject of speculation – with Georg by reading Mirabeau’s famous at the time letters to his lover, Sophie, of which she writes to Luise, her correspondent, that she should read them, except that she imagines Luisa won’t have time, and won’t read in bed, being more inclined to sleep, and is too “good” for a “ugly monster” [hassliche Bosewicht] as the extraordinary Mirabeau was, who had virtues and talents enough to supply a thousand normal people, and too much true intelligence to seriously be a monster, as one can conclude out of particular features. He may have been ugly, he says that often enough in the letters – but he loved Sophie, for women certainly don’t love the beauty of men – and yet the ugly man imposes himself through his exterior on the unruly masses…”

We remember, of course, the striking ugliness of Georg Forster. And that, too, of Chamfort. A revolution of ugly men.

from the other shore

My friend R., M.’s husband, is skeptical of my book. Unfortunately, at one point I described my project as “against happiness” – which is true in a complicated sense. Still, R. quotes that back at me – he has a good ear for the ridiculous things I say. And that phrase certainly goes against R.’s New Left politics.

On New Years Eve, we were all in Malinalco. Chepe has a country house there. I’d previously been down there in 2005. It is a compound of three houses – one is Chepe and Tania’s house, one is a guest house, and one is the house that Tania’s mother lives in. It is a perfect place for long, wordy afternoons, as though cut from a Tom Stoppard play. We all drink, smoke and snack, waiting for dinner, which will be the trout M. bought from the market about half a mile away. The kids throw each other into the cold swimming pool behind Tania’s mother’s house – we can hear them shriek. Friends and relatives show up, say hi, disappear.

M., in the hammock, complains to me that the beginning of the Sorrows of Werther, which she is thinking of teaching to her students this semester on my recommendation, is too lachrymose. Why did I suggest it? I make a few suggestions as to what is historically important in Werther. R. interjects that Werther is not new – that the treatment of love ending in suicide is prefigured in the medieval romance literature, as Denis de Rougemont shows. And he says, Werther is a jerk.

M. says she isn’t going to teach her class that her husband thinks Werther is a jerk. Who cares if R. thinks Werther is a jerk?

Tatiana draws up a chair. She enjoys the fuss R., M. and I are making. She doesn’t say much, but smokes and watches. I reply that there is something different happening in Werther than, say, in the Arthurian romances. One has to have a sense for how history enters the system of the passions. That, I say, has to do with the synthesis between a sentiment, a situation, and a sanction – I reference Durkheim and Ogien. It is in the forging of these syntheses, in the interstices, that we can make a history of the passions possible. So, in particular, we should take the household demographic situation of Europe in the 18th century, which is much different than in the eleventh century, and use it as a reference for understanding how certain syntheses produce sentiments. In particular, with the love-choice marriage, the question arises whether love is the kind of thing described by a longer synthesis, or whether shorter, intense syntheses are at its base.

But R. is not convinced by this, and insists that Werther nevertheless represents an old, Christian thematic of coupling love with death. And that, he says, is a reiteration of an old familiar nihilism, which buffers all the old institutions. What he demands, he says, by way of Marx, Nietzsche and Deleuze, is not my syntheses, which all fall under the notion of the negation of the negation, but an affirmation of an affirmation – love affirmed as it is, in life. We have to get past the clutter of guilt and shame that have been built around the life processes.

My problem with this, I say, is that it is the wrong way to start the investigation. Our material should first be seen as it is, as it is performed, materialized in performance. Whether I reject the coupling of life and death or not, as a social phenomena, the thematic exists. I’m more interested in how to account for it so that I can see how it changes.

I don’t disagree with you from the view of the historian, R. says.

At this point, a couple appears in the yard, coming from Tania’s mother’s house. Hola, everybody says. I say, we are talking about love and happiness. Tatiana laughs.

ps - my review of Patrick Tyler's history of U.S. foreign relations with the Middle East since Eisenhower was published today here.

revolts - intestinal and otherwise

I flew in from Mexico on New Year’s Day. And around six o’clock that night, a little bug crept out from my intestinal fauna and launched a popular revolt against my oons and being by forcing me to vomit copiously every forty five minutes. Alas, copiously does not describe how much my stomach can contain – I’ve never been one of nature’s trencherman. Rather, I have the delicate stomach of a 14 year old schoolgirl considering ballet as a career.

So I went to sleep for 24 hours, waking up now and then to swallow sugared water.

Apparently my organism has recovered. My mind hasn’t fully recovered, however – I have a notebook stuffed with comments I was going to post, here, but an almost insurmountable sloth stands in the way of that ever happening.

So, as a form of light entertainment, here are some comments on the unconsciously hilarious NYT article about Egypt that appeared this morning, under Steve Erlanger’s by-line. One of my wilder predictions for this New Year is that Egypt, which resembles Iran under the Shah, without the oil money, will undergo a revolution. This is simply an intuition – as the Israelis slaughter more and more Gaza Palestinians on the principle, apparently, that nobody can stop them, my intuition tells me that Egypt, heavily dependent on handouts from Saudi Arabia and the U.S., will be on the receiving end of the real collateral damage. Erlanger’s clueless analysis, which could easily have been written by a man locked in the bowels of the Heritage Foundation instead of a man supposedly walking the streets of Cairo, has all the earmarks of a report from a protectorate that is going down.

“CAIRO — Egypt is the crucial, if reluctant, intermediary between Israel and Hamas, which is no great friend of this moderate secular state. Still, a sustained Israeli ground operation in neighboring Gaza would sharply increase public pressure on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to do more to help the Palestinians there.

Few criticize Mr. Mubarak himself, and there are widespread feelings here that the radical group Hamas provoked the current crisis. Yet there is unhappiness with the government’s relative silence about Israel’s bombing campaign and its Palestinian victims, and with the apparent lack of diplomatic pressure from Cairo on Israel and the United States to stop the fighting.”

This is lovely reporting. The “widespread feeling”, the mushmouthed “unhappiness with the government’s relative silence…” – truly, this is the kind of reporting you get when your introductions all come from the American embassy. “Few criticize Mr. Mubarak himself” – what can one say? Perhaps Mr. Erlanger might have sought an intro to the jails, to find out what happens to those disaffected few who don’t share the ‘widespread’ feeling among Egypt’s cocktail set. This kind of reporting shares the willful blindness of CIA reports coming out of Iran in 1978 – a little bazaari discontent, nothing that a little sulfur and flint can’t take care of.

Since Egypt is an authoritarian society in which there is nothing like a ‘democracy’ – our favorite word, covering a multitude of American sins in the Middle East, the thing and cause we are always ardently supporting but somehow, through an evil voodoo, end up not supporting at all, and in fact crushing in any of its manifestations – the NYT has to reach around to find kindly, soothing words – an alka seltzer rhetoric shake. Thus the talk of a “moderate secular state”., which is another way of saying, apparently, “a dictatorship by an eighty year old man”.

Most enjoyable is the contrast Erlanger draws between the complicatedness of things and, uh, reality:

“Given the continuing Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, deep divisions among Palestinians and a Gaza controlled by Hamas, the Egyptian government “must make difficult choices,” he said.
“Egypt is working for peace while trying to work realistically with the situation in Gaza, where a radical group took over the territories next to Sinai, a sensitive subject for Egypt,” Mr. Said continued. “So Egypt is trying to support Palestinian humanitarian needs, but not allow a radical group to control the situation, dominate the Palestinian issue or affect Egyptian internal politics.”

But such complications are not easy for most Egyptians to grasp, especially when they see the constant repetition of images of Israeli bombs and dead Palestinians on Al Jazeera.”

Erlanger’s article has to bridge so many complications that it finally lapses into incoherence, as ‘widespread support’ for Mubarak is reduced, in the last paragraph, into an impotent unpopularity:

Ms. Malky, the editor at Daily News Egypt, said that the government is making it clear it wants Hamas to fail. “They’re afraid of the internal situation,” she said. “They don’t want a successful Islamic or Muslim Brotherhood experiment on their own border.

But she warned that unpopularity should not be confused with weakness. “The perception of the government in the feelings of the masses is deteriorating,” she said. “But their power and ability to contain whatever dissent may come out has not been shaken in the least.”

Yes, this is a riskier prediction than those I pronounced at the beginning of last year – it was easy to see that the U.S. economy was going down, while what do I know about Egypt? Yet the combination here of a worldwide recession, the indifference of the Egyptian elite to the murder of Palestinians, and the contrast between the external impotence of the state and its internal omnipotence in crushing dissent are precisely the factors that lead to revolution. Countering which is the eternal inertia of things. Usually, it is better to bet on inertia – it almost always comes in first. But Gaza doesn’t seem to be ending…