review of One Dimensional Woman

[Cross posted from News from the Zona]

La mère en prescrira la lecture à sa fille… -The epigraph of Philosophe dans le boudoir.

There is a story about the French feminist, Pauline Roland, that goes like this. In 1848, a faction of the socialist saint simonians had gathered together in Broussac, a village about 13 miles from Nohant, under their leader, Pierre Leroux. George Sand, who lived in Nohant, had been the one to persuade Leroux to move the village after Leroux had been officially exiled from Paris as a radical. Leroux, in turn, invited Roland to live in Broussac and assume the duties of a teacher. At the time Roland was being financially crushed under the burden of supporting her three children by her own labors; she did this because she had no intention of letting the fathers of these children intervene in any way in their lives. Thus, she felt that they had no duty to provide for the children – on the contrary. Paternity, she proclaimed, was a superstitious imposition. Another superstitious imposition, the monarchy, fell in France in 1848, and elections were subsequently held in, among other places, Broussac. Roland went to the town hall and tried to cast a ballot for Leroux, only to be refused admission. The story goes that when the police took her in for her attempted vote, she told them that she was “Marie Antoinette” Roland.

I think there is something deep about this story. On the one hand, Pauline Roland was a socialist. After her stay in Broussac, she returned to Paris and was an active member of the workers’ association that briefly sprang up in that city. It was for this subversive activity (as well as for “feminism” and “moral degeneracy”) that she was tried under Louis Napoleon and exiled to Algeria. According to the memoirs of a member of the printers union, Bosson, Roland had shrewdly sized Louis Napoleon up and was scathing about the way some union leaders – notably Leroux – were still unclear about Louis Napoleon’s intentions on the evve of the coup d’etat in 1851: “Pierre Leroux made an incredulous smile, he told me: I know my little Louis, he is incapable! Pauline Roland who was a frail creature, a mere breath, jumped about like a lamb: Your little Louis! But I love a thousand times more the butcher Cavaignac [leader of the reaction] than your little Louis!” [see Paul Chauvet]

On the other hand, as she knew – and as feminist historians from Marie d’Agoult to Joan Landes have noticed – the status of women worsened during the time of the French Revolution. The Romantic revenge against the women of the eighteenth century was codified in Napoleonic law. The great melody of equality, which found its voice in Olympe de Gouges and Condorcet, had its head cut off – for not only did Gouges, among other ultra women, go to the guillotine, but the culture of the salons, in which women, as Landes put it, could be the ‘adjuncts’ of power, was targeted for destruction by the revolutionaries and, to an extent, by Napoleon (whose vulgarities regarding Madame de Stael would have been looked upon as extremely distasteful under the ancien regime). By an irony of circumstances, Roland’s final trial, staged by Leroux’s “little Louis”, was less about her subversive activities than her shocking behavior as a wanton woman and a mother – which was exactly how Hebert had stage managed the case against Marie Antoinette in 1793.

‘Marie Antoinette’ Roland names, I think, the tension between feminism and the left. In the seventies, some feminists tried to straddle that tension by identifying patriarchy with capitalism. However, I can’t see this as anything other than a tactic of conceptual desperation, and certainly not a logical conclusion drawn from history.

The tension between a left that subsumes the historical female difference to reproduction (in keeping with a logic that can only see systems of production) and a feminism that often collaborates in its own narrowing to a series of consumer choice runs all the way through Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, which begins by asking: “Where have all the interesting women gone?” The book is in the fine tradition of the political pamphlet, which takes its first duty to be flinging some extreme truths in the face of the public. For in the pamphleteer’s soul, the truth is always and forever extreme. It is a genre that Power excels at.

The book is both a plea for a useable past and a summing up of the dreadful uses made of feminism in the 00s: the bad faith feminism that provided the cynical grounds for our neo-colonialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, shoulder to shoulder, of course, with Saudi Arabia, that paragon of women’s rights; or the extension of feminism to mean, anything connected with a powerful woman, however dubious her politics or economics; or the Sex and the City feminism that normalized the independent woman as a consumer of gourmet chocolates and a really really fun person who happens to be oh so charmingly for equal rights for women.

Right off the bat, I am predisposed to favor this book. It is not only that I am a fan of Nina Power’s blog, Infinite Thought. It is that I am an intellectual thief of that site. Her site, in many ways, taught me how to write my own blog. When I first starting reading Power, I had started my blog already. But I didn’t know how what tone exactly to take. Was I going to write small essays? Make a link machine for friends? Use it as my diary? Power was one of the first bloggers I read who had figured out the genre, at least to my satisfaction, and I took many of the things I wanted to do for most of this decade from Power’s stylistic suggestions. She had Djed the mix of the theoretical, the personal, and the colloquial that I knew, immediately, was what you could do with a blog. Later, her use of montage like use of shock or mock images, a la John Heartsfeld, was something I decided to slavishly imitate. I was a blogger with an unknown tropism, and Infinite Thought was my sun.

In particular, Power figured out how to lower the ego of the blog. Many blogs – and mine included – are long arias of me, which can get tedious over time. Power, however, uses language as something that she can stumble over, transforming egotism into slapstick. This isn’t British self effacement, but a sort of juggler’s fumble. All of those funny “erms” and curve ball rhetorical questions in her blog posts have a function. It is through these techniques that she establishes an intimacy with the reader – for the fumble is a hand outstretched. It is a contact. It is a gesture that reminds us of the author’s sovereign right to touch. Benjamin, in his essay on Leskov, speaks of the tactile moment in the story, when the storyteller touches the listener, puts his hand on the listener’s shoulder. That self-interruption, that way of making the language something that actually comes off the tongue and is thus heir to a death no word itself could feel, is an extremely subtle move in the internet world – it is a quick, golden flash – and you have to look for it - for mostly, on the internet, every intimacy has been mimicked to death, and the storyteller’s touch turns out to be the cold, cancerous hand of corporate speak, poking you in the eye.

Thus, I read One Dimensional Woman, Power’s first book, against her already pretty formidable output. Although the book sometimes jumps around “like a lamb”, betraying its blog origins, the extended meditation on pornography, sexpol utopias, and the contrast between radical feminism and what Power calls the current attitude of “deflationary acceptance” – the era of normalized feminism – is a continuous piece of cultural criticism of a pretty high order. I am extremely sympathetic to her viewpoint – I believe Power is advocating for the sociability of pleasure, or what used to be called “volupté.” Thus, she mostly avoids the pitfalls of the sterile opposition between pornography and erotica – and, though it may seem like an oxymoron, she calls for something like a Habermasian pornography (I never, ever thought I would put those two things together! The universe truly is the Library of Babel, and everything will eventually conjoin with everything else). This is a strength of her materialist and productionist viewpoint. The weakness, however, is that, while she does explore the history of dirty movies and the 80s drive, by some feminists, to ban them, she doesn’t explore the larger history of feminist strategies and the persistent fissure that exists between the left and feminism. McKinnon and Dworkin, after all, were by no means the first feminists to turn the movement into a fight against a social ‘vice’. Feminists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Anglosphere – and even in Mexico – were allies, for instance, of the temperance movement. They crusaded against child labor, and against prostitution. Against the lineaments of gratified desire, feminism has always adduced the social fact of systematic violence – of drunken husbands beating wives, of the degradation, illness, and early death endemic to the prostitute’s trade, or – in the case of pornography – of the purported link with rape. Jane Gallup has suggested that feminism is divided between bad girl and good girl feminisms. One can question whether even irony can rescue that division from an infantilizing logic to which it reduces the feminist dialectic, but it does, at least, provide us with a sense of how feminism is divided on the question of the sociability of pleasure. In a sense, the normalization of feminism in the 00s, against which Power directs her polemic, is a normalization of a kind of bad girl feminism. For what is the solution to male drunkards beating their wives? Woman friendly alcohol. Woman friendly cigarettes, woman friendly porn, woman friendly products and services – by a strange dialectical twist, the bad girl alliance with the lineaments of gratified desire has driven this feminism into an advocacy of the female subject as an equal consumer.

Here, I wish Power had been a little more panoramic in her vision of feminism – and had not dealt simply with the movement as though it had sprung up almost exclusively in the late 1960s.

Yet this might be asking to much from a book that is intentionally as short as a bullet. What I really want to say, watching Power aimi for the heart of the era of normalized feminism, is: Shoot Nina! Shoot!

the post I didn't post

I've put up a post at News From the Zona that really belongs here. But NFTZ needs a new post, poor blog, and I want to let the post there, re Poe, Baudelaire, Derrida and Lacan twist a bit more before I move it here.

junk, destiny, and personal myth

Jean-Yves Trépos, an anthropologist with the Equipe de Recherche en Anthropologie et Sociologie de l’Expertise, made a study, in 1993, of the interaction between a clinician and illicit drug users who had been referred there by the state. In “Auto-control and proto-professionalization among drug users” (2003), he used a concept from Elias, proto-professionalization – the emergence of recognizable codes, routines and disciplines in a given social set – and applied it to drug users, following the suggestion of a dutch medical anthropologist, Abram de Swann. It is not the individual that is proto-professionalized, in this theory, but the network in which the individual operates. We know these traits from our everyday experience: the guy who knows about computers but doesn’t work in the computer field, the amateur photographer, the birdwatcher. What we are searching for, in the initial period of capitalism as a dominant economic form in the West, are the gaps in the system of the division of labor - for it is through those gaps that we can understand something important about the resistance to the culture of happiness, mounted on behalf of the imagination, that was fought in one way or another by a number of disparate types - from the addict to the slave to the laundress to the poet. Imagine this as a tableau, with these as witnesses in the background. Here, in this historical moment, here it was that happiness as a total social fact and the capitalist division of labor became interdependent.

Trépos discovered a lesser level of proto-professionalization among pot smokers than among heroin users. There are degrees of the Mordspiel.

“With IT [therapeutic intervention] for heroin, one glimpses in fact another world (and sometimes even one completely enters it). Among the users arrested for this product, there are no doubt hardened professionals, who are able to reference themselves in terms of a career (in Howard Becker’s sense). But in the group one has mostly to do here with consumers on the road to chronic use, already possessing a pretty technique (of rhetoric and gestures) and who hesitate between amateur and semiprofessional experience of limits (which still offer the possibility of turning around (du retour en arriere) and submission to the corporal demands of addiction. If they don’t believe they are “there” yet, it is for different reasons than the ones above [the pot smokers]: they have already made this experience and, most likely, the most wise no longer envision psychiatry as anything other than a provider of prescriptions... But the most striking trait, in reading the notes of conversations with the doctor, it the pronounced taste for the interpretation of one’s proper trajectory, which is translated by an abundant story, pursued from one visit to the other and by a sense of dialogue [repliques]. Still, one should not imagine that we are going to find the stability of the interactions that we observed with the users of cannabis: this is the universe of missed appointments, certain being created by an interruption that is strongly reminiscent of the irruption of the real (overdose, arrest, but also cure or work). In brief, the interactions here are much more spectacular.”

The universe of missed appointments – here, too, we can connect the dots, find a path. Trépos speaks of the ‘irruption of the real’ in the sense of the negative, that which is exterior to the institution and the role the user plays within it – although in itself the cause can be positive, or at least filled with a context. An overdose, being fired from a job, getting a job. These missed appointments create two things: one is that the “chronicisation” of the drug – its chronic use – generates a chronicisation of visiting the clinic. Unlike pot smokers, heroin users have a much harder time getting away from the clinic. The other thing is that the spectacular nature of the missed appointments – the frequency of life-changing instances – is reflected in the autobiographies, the great narratives, that the users tell. They are the correlate of the failure that has brought the user to his object, his commodity, his demonic happiness. The failure is performed for the doctor. Trépos calls these negative autobiographies – here, image management is about people who are too ‘cowardly’ to commit suicide. People, incidentally, that I identify with myself. Those born to lose, and who keep picking at the skin of that loss. Why? Perhaps in order to revise the terms of any destiny that is divided between losing and winning.

the spirit of the crossroads: nature and artifice

In Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz quote a fascinating anecdote from Pliny’s Natural History:

“According to Duris, Lysippus the Sicyonian was not the Pupil of any one, but was originally a worker in brass, and was first prompted to venture upon statuary by an answer that was given by Eupompus the painter; who, upon being asked which of his predecessors he proposed to take for his model, pointed to a crowd of men, and replied that it was Nature herself.”

(Naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non artificem)

This exemplary gesture (and oh how I have always loved a pointed finger!) is surprising to a modern sensibility in which the finger is more naturally pointed at what exists outside the circle of men – at rock, or tree, or landscape. Kris and Kurz take the story of Lysippus as a narrative that gives us, or that gave us, for a long time, a way of thinking about what the artist does. And insofar as that doing is an immaculate birth, a recognition that flows through the eye and the hand and the body, it is a particular kind of myth: “ Since Alexander’s time Lysippus has ranked as one of those to whom “the conquest of Nature through Art” – the ideal that also emerges from Pliny’s account of him – owes most. In classical antiquity he was already credited with saying that the ancients (his predecessors) had depicted men as they were, whereas he depicted them as they appeared (Pliny,34:65)” [15-16]

I devoted a post to Kris’s notion of the personal myth last year. Since I am taking the autobiographical dejecta, so to speak, of certain artists – De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Burroughs among them – to probe into the history of the imagination and its worlds within the artificial paradise - I propose returning to Kris here, where nature and artifice – what what men are and what they appear to be, where the smith and the artist – come to a crossroads. It is the crossroads, or the spirit of the crossroads, which I want to carry off – or be carried by. It is a sphere in which vocation and career do not define the trajectory of human existence. I would guess that there is a necessary porousness, a necessary inconsistency, an elbow room beyond the concepts in use, in any society.

Kris and Kurz again: “Eupompos’s remark joins the repudiation of tradition with the adherence to nature. It is undoubtedly due to this double meaning that he is referred to again and again to characterize new programs of realism in art.”

What we meet at the crossroads, here, is an epistemological couple – invention and discovery – under the masks of which we find another couple, the mythic couple of nature and artifice – in the case of Lysippus, appropriately enough, the transition from smith to sculptor. Kris and Kurz find the motif of the artist discovered as a child, already displaying a genius for arts, in a number of vita scattered through art history – and not only in the West. “Or, to cite a remote derivative, the Japanese painter Maruyama Okyo was discovered by a passing samurai, having painted a pine tree on a paper sack in the village store.” [27]

Baudelaire’s life and works – his extraordinary intuition of the artificial paradise and its relationship to the “gulf of the number” (“Tout est nombre. Le nombre est dans tout. Le nombre est dans l’individu. L’ivresse est un nombre”) was such that it gives his entire work an aura of backwards holiness - and I have, I hope, emphasized enough over the past year the crucial moment of backwards reading, the sorciere's spell, the moment when backwards and forwards are delinked. The condition that made his experience exemplary for the modern artist is one of a missing moment - the mythical moment of discovery never happens. The discovery – the moment in which the patron elevates the artist from the forge – is multiply linked to a hierarchy in which this particular moment can happen – at least in myth. We have all heard the long story of the death of patronage, its agony in the eighteenth century, and the freeing of the artist. But there is more to this than the decay of an institution.

cowardice of the great

Behind Proust’s essay on Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire, one feels the whole experience of the Dreyfus affair, which taught Proust an unforgettable lesson: how much depends upon the cowardice of the great. It is this insight that drove the alienated liberals towards socialism at the end of the nineteenth century. In Sainte Beuve’s treatment of Baudelaire, Proust saw an emblem of the system of relations that put the imagination at the service of the platitude, and the platitude at the service of maintaining, at any price, one’s place in the artificial paradise.

Of course, the essay has capacities, pockets, unexplored frontiers that can’t be reduced to the above thesis. But to understand the peculiar immersion of the artificial paradise – the swallowed commodity that swallows the user (as we restlessly toss and turn in the golden egg) – I want to use Proust’s essay as the torch that lights my way into the vault.

Proust’s problem in the essay is not just to untangle Sainte Beuve’s relationship to Baudelaire – his maddening assumption of superiority, his strategy of deferring the moment of writing about the poet until it is too late, the Cheshire cat language he uses that at one point makes Proust cry out: “quelle vieille bête ou quelle vieille canaille…” like Charlus in the final stages of exasperation – his problem, the deeper problem, is to untangle Baudelaire’s relationship to Sainte Beuve: the unfailing politeness, the sincere delight he took in any scraps thrown him by “l'oncle Beuve.”

These are tangled ties, knots within Gordian knots. The screw turns. Proust’s solution is extremely beautiful.

Comme le ciel de la théologie catholique qui se compose de plusieurs ciels superposés, notre personne, dont l'apparence que lui donne notre corps avec sa tête qui circonscrit à une petite boule notre pensée, notre personne morale se compose de plusieurs personnes superposées. Cela est peut-être plus sensible encore pour les poètes qui ont un ciel de plus, un ciel intermédiaire entre le ciel de leur génie, et celui de leur intelligence, de leur bonté, de leur finesse journalières, c'est leur prose. Quand Musset écrit ses Contes, on sent encore à ce je ne sais quoi par moments le frémissement, le soyeux, le prêt à s'envoler des ailes qui ne se soulèveront pas. C'est ce qu'on a du reste dit beaucoup mieux :

Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes.

(Like the heaven of Catholic theology, which is composed of many superposed heavens, our person, with the appearance given it by our body with its head, which confines our thought to a small bowl, our moral person is composed of many superposed persons. This is perhaps more felt in the case of poets, who have an extra heaven, an intermediary heaven between that of their genius and that of their intelligence, that of their generosity, of their daily canniness, which is their prose. When Musset writes his Stories, one senses again this unknown momentary quality in the quavering, the sleekness, the unfolding of wings that do not extend in flight. Which, besides, is said much better: Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes.) (my translation)

This is as central an idea to Proust, I think, as the idea of the eternal return was to Nietzsche – and was evoked by the same long experience of the cowardice of the great. Saint Beuve for Baudelaire, Wagner for Nietzsche, and, in Proust’s case, the collective cowardice of the establishment, including the literary establishment – the Daudets, for instance – in the Dreyfus case.

Urban renewal

Owen has written a very suave piece in the Guardian about the London suburbs. There’s a show at the London Transport Museum, Suburbia, which hails the synergy (if not conspiracy) between the advancement of the London subway system and the development of London’s outer ring. As Owen puts it, dapperly:

“The exhibition alludes to the fact that London's private transport companies were the sponsors and often the creators of suburbia, extending their lines into open country, promoting the glories of the countryside, and then developing it out of existence.”

Ah, the displaced rural nymphs. Myself, even as a boy loose in the suburbs of Atlanta, it amused me that the apartment complexes of Dekalb county would invariably give themselves names evocative of the stuff they had just bulldozed over in order to offer the 2bd 1bth for a reasonable 1970s price of 200 or 300 per month. Oakwood Trail. Sweetwater Acres.

The exhibit's enthusiasm for suburbia apparently wanes after the sweet collaboration between transport and land developers was rudely interrupted by nationalization: “After 1945, however, there were no more speculative incursions of London Transport into the countryside.” And the ductus of desire changes, too – the car comes in, and the city is no longer something one wants to be within reasonable distance of, but something to escape.

I wonder how the firebombing of London figured in that change?

There’s a nice paper by Peter Galison entitled “War against the Center” that takes up the issue of de-centering – suburbs in the fifties to de-centered information networks – or the Internet – in the sixties through the nineties - and the everpresent shadow of the bomb:

“Here I would like to point toward an architectural dispersion rather less abstract than that celebrated by a generalized zeitgeist, by a shift in an economic base "reflected" in the cultural superstructure, by an epochal postwar taste change toward suburban life, or by an entropic flow away from an ordered city core. No doubt such intellectual, pragmatic, aesthetic, and stochastic drives did contribute to the pressure driving dense city cores outward. But today I want to begin elsewhere. Not in 1973 with the oil crisis and subsequent economic upheaval, nor with the social upheavals or deconstructivist literary-theoretical work of the 1960s. Nor, for that matter, will I start with the Internet, though I will come back to it. Instead I will address bombs: the bombs of the long war that, in a certain sense, began in the 1930s, accelerated after the Nazi seizure of power, continued across the end of World War II, through the cold war, and even past the fall of the Soviet Union into the present unsettled moment.”

Galison wrote this before 9/11 – the last sentence is just a feeling, an ache in the global bones.

Galison focuses on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stationed in East Anglia during the war. This bureaucracy was making a sort of immense stress map of the German population, economy, and military machine. They were making this map not to travel it, but to delink it, burning building by burning building. “Appropriately enough, Franklin d'Olier, president of Prudential Insurance, ran the whole of the Survey- the greatest damage-assessment program in history.” One of the major figures in it was Paul Baran, a Marxist economist. One of the minor - W.H. Auden. Although Auden did know Central Europe.

It is in the game between the USBS and Speer’s Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion – and game theory was, of course, being developed at this time by Neumann with the Cowles commission back in the U.S. – that we come to the endgame of modernism – if we take modernism as really dead. What the USBS discovered was that bombing was not like pulling out a plug. In the end, German industry survived: "even in the case of a very concentrated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made, since otherwise the enemy, if he can survive the initial shock, will be able to take successful countermeasures. “

While this might not seem like poetry, it became the good news of the Cold War period. Countermeasures – o the heavenly sound of it – meant resurrection and survival. To build the factory with specs that included the potential attack, this became the holy grail. To disperse the community from the heart of the firestorm – to decentralize communications – to randomize hubs. Such were the commands in the voice of the Pharaonic god, whose pyramid was a pentagon. What is synthesized can be decomposed, each tributary traced back to its source, each source mapped for anti-aircraft gun emplacements, each operation given instructions on the pattern of destruction expected.

Oddly, the Germans – so good at systematically going through the records to decimate Jews – did not seem to understand the science of destruction on this scale. In Gravity’s Rainbow, that is one of the overriding mysteries – why make random strikes with V2s? Surely they were trying to hit something. Deluded, like bad action movie directors, by special effects, the Luftwaffe treated bombing as a Wagnerian spectacle.

“Autumn is a funny time to be bombed. It is the hopeful start of the home year. It is not a time when exalted feeling runs high. Autumn used to stop you sighing after Ewigkeit and make you feel how much you liked just now. You felt rooted deeply – and loved your roots. Even in Britain it was Thanksgiving time. Autumn used to be a protracted feast of Saint Cosy: the hearth meant a great deal, the mothballs were shaken out of fur coats, the children went back to school, the blue misty evenings drew in. In the country, in the city squares was the tang of weedfires, the brisk rustle of leaves being swept up. This year, leaves are swept up with a tinkle of glass in them.” [Elizabeth Bowen]

The Wagnerian spectacle fizzled out in that tinkle of glass. But the future, definitely, was being forged in fire. For after the war was over, the war wasn’t over:

“Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one were reflections of one another. When Charles E. Wilson, director of the Office of Defense Mobilization, came before the National Security Resources Board of the President's Executive Office, he needed an expert on how to disperse industry. To the captains of industry assembled for a 1951 hearing, Wilson sought to justify his strictures about splitting plants by ten or twenty miles. "Mr. Gorrie brought me a real expert on that. I call him a real expert because he was one of the men who had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany, and cer- tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safety."25 Bombers braced for bombs.”

Galison’s point is that the history of architecture and urbanism in the post-war period should not simply fasten onto architects, or fashions. Rather, they should study the final Survey of the Strategic Bombing Survey – because, in the fifties, everybody else was.

Weekend croaking

There is enough gloom outside my window to delight the heart of Poe's raven. I'm going to go on to the artificial paradise via Baudelaire, next. But not in this post, where I will simply suggest that everybody watch Les Rita Mitsouko videos, like this one. Even Poe's raven liked it - croaking, ever more, cheri!

hide and seek and ontology: SR II

Deep Blue I wanna give it all to you
Deep Blue I know that scares you - Ladytron


What was in the beginning? Who was in the beginning? It was in the beginning. It (which comes back to us, as children, as the one who finds the ones who are hiding and tags them – making them it) must have been there – for if it wasn’t there, was there a non-itless world?

“Love overcame it in the beginning, which was the seed springing from mind; poets having searched in their heart found by wisdom the bond of what is in what is not.

Their ray which was stretched across - was it below or was it above? There were seed bearers, there were powers - self-power below and will above.

Who then knows who has declared it here, from whence was born this creation? The gods came later than this creation who then knows whence it arose?

He from whom this creation arose, whether he made it or did not make it, the Highest Seer in the highest heaven he forsooth knows - or does even he not know?” – Max Muller’s translation of verses from the Nasadiya hymn of the Rg Veda.

Prajapati floats in his golden egg. This egg gave birth to him. And then he impregnated the egg. In order to be given birth to. There is no “then”. There is no story here.

Hide and seek may be long ago, but the cosmological shudder, the story of the very beginning, is always a cue for the highest seriousness. In a sense, what is serious is defined by this story. We are all intrinsically interested in it – every eggfucking one of us.

LI has long sought to understand the permutations of the human limit, which is what the last two years of posts here have been largely about. During that time, the school of Speculative Realism has also made it a point that, in thinking through the human limit, philosophy can finally once and for all understand the absolute finitude of the human. O happy days! Thus, I thought, vaguely, that I was on side. But since IT’s post about SR politics, or lack thereof, I’ve read a bit more of the SR literature. Not, by any means, enough to become conversant in it, but enough to form a few opinions. I have long lost the passionate interest in ontology. I understand it, however. And insofar as SR conveys the excitement of something new, it is seductive. But its revolutionary truths come clothed in some very traditional terminology, much of which serves it badly. Myself, I was struck by how much work is done for the SR theory by that enduring trope, independence vs. dependence. Here are a few quotes:

“Science speaks to us of a time that preceded not only the relation of consciousness to the world, but any relation to the itemized world [monde repertorie]- any form of life. But since Hume and Kant, every philosopher knows well that the idea of a knowledge of things in themselves supposed to exist in an absolute fashion, that is to say, independently of the subject, not relative to it- that this conception of knowledge is floated by a realism that is dogmatic and worm-eaten (always according to the expression of Kant).” Meillassoux, Contingence et absolutisation de l’un.

“Correlationism insists that there can be no cognizable reality independently of our relation to reality; no phenomena without some transcendental operator – such as life or consciousness or Dasein – generating the conditions of manifestation through which phenomena manifest themselves. In the absence of this originary relation and these transcendental conditions of manifestation, nothing can be manifest, apprehended, thought or known. Thus, the correlationist will continue, not even the phenomena described by the sciences are possible independently of the relation through which phenomena become manifest. (51)

“For Meillassoux, the possibility of non-correlational reality – i.e. of an objective realm existing independently of any transcendental conditions of manifestation – finds its ontological guarantor in the structure of absolute possibility concomitant with absolute time.” – Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound 85.

What is striking about these passages from Meillassoux and Brassier is the thematic weight that accumulates around the dependence/independence relationship. Seemingly, this binary allows us to do any number of things. For instance, it produces sides, a versus: the correlationists and the non-correlationists. And it allows us to disregard, as inscrutable local politics, differences within the correlationist camp such that those suspects, consciousness, dasein and life can all be rounded up as co-conspirators. Of course, the idea that consciousness and dasein are mere substitutes for each other might disappoint their promoters and authors, and that, in turn, they could substitute for life seems a little odd – life here taking on qualities it isn’t normally associated with in biology - but so the reckoning goes – all of them exist as machines with a function. That function is to pump out possibility. They are transcendance producing machines.

Still, what manner of thing is this parameter, dependence/independence?
…

“There was no death, hence was there nothing immortal. There was no light (distinction) between night and day. That One breathed by itself without breath, other than it there has been nothing.”

“An axiom A of a logistic system is called independent if, in the logistic system obtained by omitting A from among the axioms, A is not a theorem.” – Alonzo Church, Introduction to Mathematical Logic (quoted by the OED)

Dependence is certainly not determination. Nor does it seem to be a cause. The thing that hangs from another thing, the child or wife that is under the authority of the father – such things are not necessarily born from the father, and certainly not made from the noose – criminals make themselves. They are independent, until they are de-pending.

Let us then roll over in the egg, the egg upon the cosmic sea, and consider some substitutions. Is, for instance, the universe dependent on time? Is it dependent on matter? In one sense – the sense in which it all begins in the big bang – the answer is no. In another sense – the sense in which the ‘laws’ of space and time organized the IT that is the universe – it is.

In this example, we sound much like Gooodman’s worldmakers. There might be a deeper point here for philosophers, which is that one of the puzzles of science is that we don’t understand what we understand. Our understanding has outstripped our imagination. This does not mean that we lack a vocabulary – it simply means that vocabulary lacks an imaginary correlate. Its correlate simply is the frame of reference as an artifact – the formula, the Feynman diagram. And, surprisingly, the things that we understand that we don’t understand we can operationalize. To reintroduce history into a narrative that wants to refuse it entrance, this is why the correlationist, the anti-realist, or whoever we have under surveillance, here, returns to histories.

Thus, it does seem like a revolutionary turn that, out of the field that one associates with an anti-foundational bias, there should arise a school which claims that It is no mystery or monster. We can meet IT and shake its hand. Come out, come out wherever you are.

When we speak of independence or dependence in philosophy, and especially the idea of mind-dependence, we are actually abridging a long and complex metaphysics. It is an abridgement that has, of course, its politics. By the time a certain idealism reached the West, in Berkeley, there was already various ideas floating about concerning the inferiority of the East. There was something distasteful about Irish prelates throwing themselves about like Eastern fakirs, no doubt. Thus, idealism assumed the cloak of the most advanced businessman, who spoke in clear, pure Locke.

It is a good question – why was the idealistic moment so late in arriving in Europe? But it is a question that goes against the grain of universal history, which asks the question, why is x (some European thing) so late in arriving in one of the non-European places. Europe cannot, after all, be dependent.

However that history goes, the Lockean context is still a good one. However bad a tutor Locke was to Shaftesbury (whose journals are an almost psychopathological cry against the man), he was very good at assuming that all men are awake – if you aren’t awake, how can you hear me? – and thus have some business at hand. Here the idea of mind-dependence and mind-independence seemed easily to be settled. Kick a rock. Or you can think of all the things that don’t depend on you thinking of them. Name what is under your power. (To use Shaftesbury’s method – the man was always writing philosophical memoranda to himself). Name what you can do nothing about by thinking. Think of the name. Think of the name as an instrument. Think how, as you take up the name, you take up a thinG that is not in your power. Recall a moment when you, your self, your thinking self, had any power over anything. But to think it is to name it, and to name it is to take an alien instrument into your hand that burns right through the ego, whether it erects itself as the very possibility of experience or as another miserable hider in the game of hide and seek.

At this point, Hume traded Hindoo depths for Lockean commerce and chose convention and habit. (There was then neither what is nor what is not, there was no sky, nor the heaven which is beyond. What covered? Where was it, and in whose shelter? Was the water the deep abyss (in which it lay)?

The SR philosophers pursue Hume on this point – but not far enough to ask questions about their dependent/independent parameters. And it is here that one feels that a certain eagerness has crept in – that the tables have turned on IT and the dogs are lose. But IT is the finder, remember – not philosophers who don’t even remember breathing when there was no breath.

The eagerness comes, perhaps, from the same direction as the rafle that brought in consciousness dasein and life as versions of the transcendental machine – alpha, beta, zeta, perhaps. Or Curly Moe and Larry. For surely it is not consciousness that forms or even dasein that forms the anti-realist core. It is, rather, just those things - convention, frames of reference, language, math – that seem happy to operate without the cogito. To conflate those things with correlationism is not just to mistell a history, but it is, shall we say, a typical philosophical mistelling, one that drops the process of production and holds to the marketer's abstract. Surely the reason that these artifacts have had such a damaging effect on the philosophical faith in realism is that they produced what realism had tried to deny could be the case – for instance, inconsistent worlds. Or rather worlds that could only be made consistent by adopting a number of bridging principles that were so cumbersome, and did so little work, that the task of creating them is slowly dying off with the last of the old logical positivists. Ernst Nagel’s pupils, salut! Instead, to understand them – that is, to operationalize them – we embraced Bayesian probabilities and world making.

Now, I am not an ontologically committing man. I strongly suspect that it is not on the level of ontology that I am going to find answers to my questions about the human limit – or at least that those answers will come from social ontologies that I will, as happily, not commit to. However, I must admit some distaste for a certain moment in Brassier’s program: ‘Nature is not our or anyone’s “home”, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.”

On the one hand, I could just classify that as typical philosopher’s obliviousness. In the age of the last terra seizure, that of the atmosphere by the CO2 emitting conquistadors, what we really need is not to mend any shattered concord. Right. In the larger sense, health has nothing to do with whether you stop cigarette smoking or not – and really, philosophy of health should be more than a pathetic twinge to help the anti-smoking lobby. Etc. The idea that nature is not our home is correct, in that home is an intensional concept which references the place from which we dump our garbage, and nature is the referent meaning, the place into which we dump our garbage. A happy arrangement, as every yahoo knows. And certainly it is going to be most unpleasant when we are thrust out of our home into our garbage, although other yahoos who aren't so lucky have certainly been on the other side of the garbage spilling, boy howdy. So it is hard to tell if SR is being tone deaf, here, to the one truly planetary issue, or if this is spoken out of some deep unconsciousness. But in any case, there is something tawdry about this ‘demystification.” It is heresy in support of orthodoxy, a very gated community paradox. It is the perfect Hummer motto. And it stinks.

We get a signal to leave you alone
Alone's where we leave you
Alone's where we find you

SR prehistory: Scheffer vs. Goodman

In the 80s, Israel Scheffer and Nelson Goodman engaged in a long polemic about Goodman’s anti-realist claims. Goodman was a robust relativist, Scheffer, a pluralist-realist. Scheffer asked how it was possible, in Goodman’s schema, to account for stars, for instance, which long preceded the existence of man. Did men make up stars? Goodman, in “Starmaking” replied:

“Let's begin by acknowledging that a right version and its world are different. A version saying that there is a star up there is not itself bright or far off, and the star is not made up of letters. On the other hand, saying that there is a star up there and saying that the statement "There is a star up there" is true amount, trivially, to much the same thing, even though the one seems to talk about a star and the other to talk about a statement. What is more important, we cannot find any world-feature independent of all versions. Whatever can be said truly of a world is dependent on the saying - not that whatever we say is true but that whatever we say truly (or otherwise present rightly) is nevertheless informed by and relative to the language or other symbol system we use. No firm line can be drawn between world-features that are discourse-dependent and those that are not. As I have said "In practice, of course, we draw the line wherever we like, and change it as often as suits our purposes."

And a few paragraphs later: “Scheffler contends that we cannot have made the stars. I ask him which features of the stars we did not make, and challenge him to state how these differ from features clearly dependent on discourse. Does he ask how we can have made anything older than we are? Plainly, by making a space and time that contains those stars. By means of science, that world (indeed many another) was made with great difficulty and is, like the several worlds of phenomena that also contain stars, a more or less right or real world. We can make the sun stand still, not in the manner of Joshua but in the manner of Bruno. We make a star as we make a constellation, by putting its parts together and marking off its boundaries.”

I’ve always loved Goodman’s insouciance. He is touching here on a hidden semiotic that, as a matter of fact, has much to do with the human limit: one of the crucial binaries in the life of the educated class in the West is that of making/discovering. Discovery, as I have mentioned before, oddly escaped the epistemic grid that Foucault uncovers in early modernism. Goodman is, of course, correct that science is made. But science is made to discover. The realism of the scientists is the realism of the Atlantic voyagers – it is the realism of discovery. Goodman’s notion that the star in the sky or the movie star on the screen is relative to the frame of reference is, I think, easy to mischaracterize. We are drawn by tradition into thinking that making comes entirely from the maker – but this is not Goodman’s idea. Indeed, the maker is continually resisted in the making, which is why we can talk of right versions, of rightness with regard to the frame of reference. A frame of reference will forever be both made and beyond the power of the maker. It doesn’t refer to any particular cogito – geometry is not Euclid’s secret autobiography.

Scheffer, in an essay entitled Plea for Plurarealism (2000) – so many kinds of realism! – returned to this controversy. Goodman, he claimed, was strongly motivated by the idea that there are many worlds. He was in revolt against the idea that all worlds could be reduced (theoretically) to the picture given by physics. Scheffer contends that this is not a feature that is intrinsic to realism (and confesses that he has been influenced, on this point, by Goodman). And he brings up the example of the arche-fossil:

“In a third anti-realistic argument, Goodman denies that there can be perception without conception, concluding as follows, "Although conception without perception is merely empty, perception without conception is blind (totally inoperative). Predicates, pictures, other labels, schemata, survive want of application, but content vanishes without form. We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols". Now the final sentence just quoted seems paradoxical as it stands. For it seems to imply that there was no world prior to human speech or symbolism.” And, taking this a step further:

“In defending the "no world without words" doctrine, Goodman argues that "talk of unstructured content or an unconceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating; for the talk imposes structure, conceptualizes, ascribes properties". But if we assert the existence of trees in the primordial past, we are affirming trees after all, not a bit of unstructured content or an unconceptualized given. Those ancient trees that we now describe by using the word "tree" surely did not require this word in order to have arisen and flourished. It is of course self-defeating to call something a wordless word or a non-descriptive description, but it is not self-defeating to describe something in words which neither contains nor is a product of words.”

It is interesting to see how this dispute – without, as far as I can tell, being specifically referred to – has been recoded in the continental idiom recently by the Speculative Realism school. There, the key binary (independence vs. dependence) is, again, an idiom that returns us to the trans-atlantic world in which one nation “made” itself through a declaration of independence. I’ll do another post about the role of 'independence' in the SR discourse.

From the foot of versus

“Yes reader countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength They are not dead but sleeping.” - De Quincey, Suspira de Profundis

The palimpsest section of Suspira de Profundis operates according to the dysfunctional logic, the white mythology, that Derrida finds in Plato’s Phaedrus. There are two series of terms, here, in which writing finds its tenement, its power. In one series, the tenement is cursed – literally, this is the series of the witch’s portion, and potion. Like the contract that is written in blood and signed by Christoph Haitzmann, the painter who was the object of Freud’s essay, writing here misuses its fluids, its graphemes, it is the bad counselor, it is the evil vizier, it undermines memory, it is a voodoo-ed copy of the living word (half dead in the dead media to which it is assigned, stone, wax tablet, sheet of parchment, sheet of paper). But another series makes writing the good counselor, the wise vizier, the repository of memory, and, indeed, memory’s natural metaphor. Writing as pharmakon here creates the very power that distinguishes the animal from the vegetable: the animal has a past. The presence of the past – the present within the past – is, metaphorically, just this writing, this inscription. In the vaults of history, we take history to be a matter of records, a matter of leaving a trace.

Derrida is often read as a defender of writing against its accusers, from Plato to Rousseau. This reading comes about so automatically because, I think, philosophy has come to mean automatically taking a side. But I don’t read Derrida as ascending to the summit of some great “versus” – rather, he stands at the foot of it. Of the versus itself, of forward and backward, of the wolf going down the path of pins and the girl in the red hoodie going down the path of needles (“Le loup se mit à courir de toute sa force par le chemin qui était le plus court, et la petite fille s’en alla par le chemin le plus long, s’amusant à cueillir des noisettes, à courir après des papillons, et à faire des bouquets des petites fleurs qu’elle rencontrait.). And it is my contention, of course, and in fact my single insight into universal history, that these are the same paths, one going to, one coming from – eternally the same and different path. In this, I am unoriginal in the extreme. I follow Red Riding Hood, Michelet’s witch, Derrida, the Dao. The good counselor writes the social contract, and his brother, the evil vizier, writes the sealed message carried by Bellerophon – as you love me, kill the messenger.

Your options tonight

You should simply skip from Limited Inc tonight to News From the Zona, where I'm proud as a little peacock of my Leskov post. Since I said what I wanted to say there. And, campers, it is all about SEX! (which I hope brings in the punters).

Otherwise, go here and listen to Mudhoney.

Sick of Happiness II

“Not the opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale.” – De Quincey, 148

“When addicts desire to give up their drug use and change their lives, they frequently are confused about what they should do instead. This confusion is especially dramatic for those who have been deeply immersed in the world of addiction for long periods of time. They may see themselves as having nowhere to turn, having burned their bridges with family and ordinary friends.” – Peter Biernacki (1990)

It is exactly this – the confusion about what to do – that defines the liminal space between one world and another. I have been focusing on the literary addict as a figure who both decodes all too perfectly the flow of commodities in the artificial paradise, and the one whose sickness is made out of happiness.


Long before there was any notion of addiction, there was a keen sense that potions can create transformations that were intrinsically irreversible. By no act of will could Odysseus’ men return to their humanity from the pig’s life that Circe’s potions had made out of them – only by a counter-drug. This confusion about what to do is a world making confusion - that is, it gets more acute as one reaches the limit of the particular routines that define a particular world The poetry of addiction, the attraction of the poet to addiction, has always been about transcendence. This is often spelled out in terms of the body - the too too mortal flesh, from which we go up. But I'd like to spell this out in terms of the world and the things that we do there. The moralistic trope that there is nothing ‘artistic’ about drugs – that the fun in them soon runs out, that they kill rather than stimulate the imagination – revenges that moment when the routines stop, when the lines around normal – around that world – vanish. For it does happen. And yet, using a routine - the taking of a drug - to transcend routine, transcendence does give way to the round of getting and taking. And so the addict becomes the victim of this narrow circulation of the commodity. With the difference that this commodity cannot be substituted. The gift stands at one end of the commodity defined system of exchange, and addiction at the other.

The artificial paradise views the addict with untender eyes because the addict knows that it is an artificial paradise. He has taken the imperative of the routine into his very cells.

That swallowing of routine, of the drug, brings us back around to the bifurcation, so sweetly and swiftfootedly traced by Derrida, between writing as that which exists in the register of simulacrum and that which exists inside as the privileged metaphor for memory and truth itself. In the first, the references take us, inevitably, back to the witch – in the second, the references take us back to the original commerce between the sense organs and the world. In De Quincey, we see this in his notion - or rather, in his routine - concerning the palimpsest.

SICK OF HAPPINESS I

“So I am a public agent and don't know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs,newspapers and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air the way a vulture will tear entrails from other mouths.” – William Burroughs, Soft Machine

Public agent, public rememberer, public confessor, a comedian of all trades in the artificial paradise. Like all comedians, a great weaver of routines. Self conscious routines are the keynote of the artificial paradise – industrially organized, or privately obsessive. The ritual, here, is quietly put to death in somebody’s kennel. All of which takes us to later threads. Still, one can go from De Quincey’s frenzied style, undercutting itself at all turns – which casts up texts concerning the connoisseurs of murder, the company of women in Suspira, the murder of Kant – with Burrough’s great period, from Junkie to Soft Machine, and see a community of spirit, peering through a dilated eye.

As we orbiters expect and dread – our training at the instrument panel has not been in vain! - the pharmakon here must find its mate in writing – writing as the internal relation of the subject to the world, in radical dissymmetry with writing as the world’s original poison. In the palimpset section of Suspira de profundis, we have an elaboration of that old image, but rebooted in terms of the phial of instant happiness. Remember, remember – it is the junkie’s special place and fate to be literally sick of happiness.

News from the Zona post

If you feel like it, go to my News From the Zona post, which I would have put up here - it has to do with trees! - except I didn't.

Or you can go to this.

his chaos I comprehended by the darkness of my own

When De Quincey turned twenty, he jotted down a memoranda for himself that listed the twelve constituents of happiness. Happiness was always a strong word for De Quincey – he had an almost cultic devotion to it that made him suspect to more robust natures like Wordsworth’s; it is certain that he truly meant it when, in the Confession, he calls opium happiness in pill form. Whenever, in his writing, we are in the neighborhood of the word “happiness”, the prose will be charged with a certain incantatory quality. The twelve constituents include such things as, education of a child, and a rather sad, ‘a personal appearance rather tolerable.” De Quincey was conscious of his small stature – and had been reproached for not being overly clean or kempt.

What is as interesting as the contents of the list is the enumeration of the constituents of happiness. For throughout De Quincey’s career as an opium eater – England’s premier drug geek – the number of drops was always of primary importance to him. He was not, at the age of twenty, acquainted with opium – except as anyone was in 1805, when opium was already a common ingredient in a number of medicinal cordials. According to Martin Booth, the years that pretty much span De Quincey’s writing career – between 1831 to 1859 – saw a massive increase in opium imports and use, from 91,000 pounds to 280,000 pounds, mostly from Turkey. As with sugar, so with opium – Britain was in the forefront of its use. But he was, at the age of twenty, already an enumerator. He was already trying to find some exterior, conceptual form to which he could attach his energies.

Enumeration – a drugged specificity – is on the other side of incantation. I understand the links – when I was a child, I would rock and count when I was in bed, in order to get to sleep. For I was never a good sleeper. With a more psychoanalytically sharpened eye, I suspect this rocking and enumeration had something to do with wanking – although I can’t really remember masturbating until the age of about 12, by which time my great struggle against wakefulness had ceased. I can feel that rocking motion in De Quincey’s writing. And of course, never far from the incantatory quality of happiness was its opposite, misery. The ‘portable ecstasies’, the commodified form of happiness that could be ‘carried in a pocket’, was, on De Quincey’s account, a vacation from life, his “Saturday’, for years. Oh vexed question of addiction, a word not in the dictionaries of either medicine or everyday life in De Quincey’s day! That we can create a thing that operates upon us as a parasite, forcing us to renew its life with our body – this idea was in the air of course by 1820, when the Confessions appeared. Frankenstein was on the horizon. De Quincey, willing to make his life work that of making his life transparent, was his own monster.

It was not obvious to De Quincey even in 1820, however, that his portable ecstasies could not be shuffled off, and that he would have to experience, as though he had no means to stop it, their slow, seemingly autonomous change to nightlong miseries. The thrill darkened.

In drug geekdom, every kick produces an equal and opposite kick. In De Quincey’s case, the kick was that opium was also the very basis of his career. The constituent of happiness that consisted in an independent income was undermined by De Quincey’s more expensive addiction to buying books. It was really this which caused all the miseries of his early twenties, because, of the amount of money left to him by his father that wasn’t frittered away in bad investments by his guardians, most of it went to paying off debts accrued to purchase rare volumes. Thus, his first great hit, The Confessions, was also necessary to sustain himself and his family. His writing life was then marked – he became a public character as an opium eater, which, in turn, gave him license to develop an antic prose long after the romantics gave way to the disapproving Victorians. And that style he was continually turning upon himself. He played his own miseries and memories for the crowd.

By 1844, a five thousand drop a day year, the basis was eating through the coherence. He wrote a friend about his newly published book on political economics:

“With respect to my book … which perhaps by this time you and Professor Nichol will have received through the publishers, I have a word to say. Upon some of the distinctions there contended for it would be false humility if I should doubt they are sound. The substance I am too well assured is liable to no dispute. But as to the method of presenting the distinctions as to the composition of the book and the whole evolution of a course of thinking, there it is that I too deeply recognise the mind affected by my morbid condition. Through that ruin and by help of that ruin I looked into and read the latter states of Coleridge. His chaos I comprehended by the darkness of my own, and both were the work of laudanum. It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins and the wrecks of some forgotten life or some abolished nature. In parts and fractions, eternal creations are carried on, but the nexus is wanting and life and the central principle which should bind together all the parts at the centre with all its radiations to the circumference are wanting. Infinite incoherence, ropes of sand, gloomy incapacity of vital pervasion by some one plastic principle -- that is the hideous incubus upon my mind always. For there is no disorganised wreck so absolute so perfect as that which is wrought by misery.”

Truly a cry from the heart, and not just from De Quincey – for a big dream, be it a theory, a plot, a poem, or simply gathering together the elements of one’s days and ways, is always one in which the peculiar terror is just that the vital nexus will be wanting.

accept no substitutes - some notes

“The common translation of pharmakon by remedy [remede] – a benficient drug – is not, of course, inaccurate. Not only can phramakon really mean remedy and thus erase, on a certain surface of its functioning, the ambiguity of its meaning. But it is even quite obvious here, the stated intention of Theuth being precisely to stress the worth of his product, that he turns the word on its strange and invisible pivot, presenting it from a single one, the most reassuring, of its poles. The medicine is beneficial; it repairs and produces, accumulates and remedies, increases knowledge and reduces forgetfulness. Its translation by ‘remedy’ nevertheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the other pole reserved in the word pharmakon,
It cancels out the resources of ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of the context. As opposed to ‘drug’ or even ‘medicine’, remedy says the transparent rationality of science, technique and therapeutic causality, thus excluding from the text any leaning towards the magical virtues of a force whose effects are hard to master, a dynamics that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject.” -Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy [B. Johnson’s translation]



I love this moment in Derrida’s essay in which the poles come out of the pharmakon – one thinks of it as like some extraterrestrial instrument or creature, from which suddenly poles shoot out. The word rests on one pole, or on the other – remedy or poison. We know these games - games of throwing dice. We just need rules in order to have winners and losers. Unfortunately, the game will be without rules in this post. There will only be losers. These are notes, bucko.

What I want to try out here is a precarious, a very precarious opposition. A shy mirroring, if we can imagine the mirror hiding itself (Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer) -- between substitution and addiction.

And futhermore - to advance slyly, slyly, and then fall on my face - on the side of substitution there is an institution – advertising. An institution devoted to disguising substitution. ‘Accept no substitutes’ was an advertising slogan that appeared in the 1880s – Chocolat Menier translated it as Evitez les contrafaçons. It is a command, an imperative, and as such is impervious to the truth table. One can obey it or not. But mark its strangeness, voyagers, nymphs and old boys. For what is being commanded here, and why? It is a slogan that must be extracted from out of its genre – advertising – where it exists as a sort of paradox. A paradox on the level of the superego. That command. For advertising, after all, consists largely of pursuading the audience that a difference exists where there is none. It produces images and words around what the industry calls “parity products” – that is, products that, in blind tests, can’t be told apart. Whiskies, cigarettes, coffees. In this context, a general command to the consumer to cease looking for substitutes is to substitute the image for the thing – or as David Ogilby, the advertising guru, said, you have to get the customer to drink and eat the image.

Take it another way - from another one of its poles – to accept no substitutes would be, really, to accept nothing – as they are all substitutes. They are, essentially, substitutable. Their presence is potentially already replaced. And thus, to obey the command is to enter into anorexia and death. For it would mean accepting nothing.

It is not clear, to all those who voyage to synthetica, that this is the voyage they signed up for. The artificial paradise is artful. and the substitutes proliferate here while denying that they are substitutes at all. Which brings us to my opposite, my secret sharer, my addict ... my special addict - my voyant addict. I'm speaking of the rare ones (although how do I know they are rare>) who come pre-addicted, the ones in whom the sensations don’t seem to go away. They pile up, they come back, they have a certain disturbing speed. De Quincey's Confession is full of the agony of those impressions that did not, like good Lockian properties, become absorbed in ideas, but lurked outside them.

There is no sense of the addict in the story told by Socrates upon which Derrida is commenting, naturally enough. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, the notion of a morbid craving, of a need, a physical or psychological need for a drug, didn’t exist. Instead, the opium, alcohol, sugar you could not do without was viewed in moral terms. It was a supplement, a prothetic, a crutch. And here, of course, we return to Socrates’ tale.

Except I won't here. I'll introduce another tale. There’s a brief novella, Kokain, by Walter Rheiner, a German expressionist. Rheiner was an addict, his brief life was as the patsy of, the second fiddle to, the commodity. He was the straight man in that rouutine. The only work of his anybody really cares about is his little novella, Kokain. His single other contribution to art was to form the subject for his friend, Konrad Felixmüller's painting. It was a painting of Rheiner's suicide.

In the novel, the narrator cannot breath in his shabby surroundings – in his apartment, on the street, in his clothes, listening to the voices of the people in the bars he goes to – all of it seems to weave about him like a canvas sack and suffocate him. At the height of this feeling, he goes to a druggist he knows and buys his cocaine – on credit – and shoots up. And then the sack falls open, and he sees himself as a son of light. Until he notices that people are regarding him suspiciously.

“And there they bent close into one another and whispered.
He strained to hear them… and there, wasn’t it there? Didn’t he clearly overhead the word, the fatal word, that was stretched gigantically across the firmament of this his night and (with the clanging of a pitiless machine) slowly chopped him up: - cocaine!co-caine! Pieces and pieces were chopped away from him, until he was soon purely and completely pulverized.” [my translation, 8]

The chopping machine –like a blade chopping out a line of powder – follows him throughout the brief little story.

To be continued

notes on Nietzsche's great politics

LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, just as Bataille divided economics into the “restricted” and the “general”, one could make the same distinction in politics. Mostly, I’ve been arguing under the sign of restricted politics, claiming that the various discourses of the truth are not just contingently located in institutions.

But general politics exerts itself beyond institutions. Nietzsche’s Grosse Politik, with its vocabulary of breeding, no doubt contains the stirrings of fascism – but it also contains a truth. Nietzsche’s great politics is about war. But the war that he describes is not between nations, nor classes, but a war of life style. A war about the living. In this sense, the great politics of the last hundred years has occurred across and around the restricted politics. For example…

For example, the greatest political event of the twentieth century. What was it? Was it 1917? Was it 1989? Was it 1947, the date marking the independence of India? All of these events fall under the sign of restricted politics. But to my mind, surely the greatest political even of the twentieth century was the collapse of agricultural populations across the globe.

How did this occur? I think four factors suffice: the development of the technology of storage; the invention of fertilizer; the mechanization of transport; and the mechanization of the farming process. Since the first Mesopotamian civilizations, a society that relied on livestock and agriculture was a society that was largely rural and peasant. In 1996, according to David Clark, for the first time, more than 50 percent of the world population lived in urban areas.

Now, what is most astonishing about this fact is that it found little expression in the restricted political sphere. Who, in the U.S. the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, India, actually questioned the fourfold technological mechanisms that were driving the smallholder out of existence? Not even the peasant parties proposed the banning of refrigeration, or fertilizer, or tractors – these things just “happened”. Of the great political figures of the 20th century, only one – Mao – engaged in a rearguard battle against this correlate of modernization. After the great disaster of the Great Leap Forward, with its Marxist orientation to industry, Mao began to rethink the end of the peasant base of society – and out of that came such disasters as the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. It is one of the ironies of the fourfold techno-structure that it makes it not only economically, but demographically impossible to support a mostly smallholder economy – for as the cities get larger, the agricultural sector has to get exponentially more efficient, or famine sets to work. According to McNeil’s environmental history of the 20th century, to support the world population at the size it was in 1999 without fertilizer, an area bigger than the size of the Amazon rain forest would have had to have been plowed. And he doesn’t subtract the other elements – take away the road system and the railroads and the better storage facilities, and modern societies would utterly collapse. In other words, urbanization is so much part of the system that the system is not only set up to make smallholding agriculture difficult, economically, but an actually menace to the urbanized populations.

As I said, the collapse of those agricultural populations rarely was presented as a choice any population or government was making. No American president ran on the ticket of radically shrinking the farming population; no Soviet premier proclaimed that policy either. The coordinates were as though set, as though insulated from any politics at all. Instead, secondary issues – price supports for agriculture, or collectivization – were the ones that penetrated the restricted sphere of politics.

Of course, the agricultural population collapse is uneven. In India, for instance, in 1996, only 26 percent of the population lived in urban areas – in China it was 41 percent. But the population flow is inexorably in one direction. But it happens across the capitalist/socialist boundary. In the U.S.S.R., as late as 1929, 80 percent of the population was rural. In 1990, 34 percent was. Agro-industry in the U.S. and collectivization in the U.S.S.R. resulted in the same linking of agriculture to urban populations and the same restructuring of agriculture on industrial lines.

According to David Clark – from whom I get all these figures except the one about the U.S.S.R, which comes from Nicholas Spulber – at the beginning of the 19th century, fewer than 3 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. This was the oldest order. We have all dealt with the effects of its destruction in terms that organize restricted politics. And there is nothing in itself wrong with this. But it is the great politics that is the mover. And it is the effect – the side effect – of the great politics that will set the agenda for the foreseeable future, from the acidification of the ocean to the seizure of the atmosphere by the developed economies.

voyage to synthetica - eldorado of all the old boys

In 1940, Fortune Magazine (which was part of the Luce empire, and featured such writers as James Agee and Archibald Macleish – as well as Whittaker Chambers) produced an issue devoted to the relatively new industry of plastic. In Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic: A cultural history, he writes: “The editors seem uncertain how to present these new materials, whether to portray plastic as an extension of natural materials or as an intoxicating disruption of the natural order. These contrary interpretation emerged not in the article’s text, which offered clear explanations of processes and applications, but in two illustrations, each a two page full color spread, each so bizarre in its own way, so rationally unwarranted, as to suggest an intrusion into consciousness from a site of unresolved psychological conflicts.”(64) I note in passing, here, Meikle’s coupling of intoxication and plastic. More importantly, this is his introduction to “Synthetica: the new continent of plastics.”

Meikle quotes the Fortune caption: “[Synthetica] extended right out of the natural world – that wild area of firs and rubber plantations, upper left –into the illimitable world of the molecule.” Although it floated on the “Sea of Glass, one of the oldest plastics known,” the continent was only recently discovered. “New countries, like Melamine constantly bulge from its coastline”, and its boundaries were “as unstable as the map of Europe.” Already possessed of its own Ruhr district, known as Phenolic, “a heavy industrial region of coal-tar chemicals fed by Formaldahyde River,” Synthetica also boasted the “more frivolous and color-loving state” state of Urea and the “glittering night life” of the resorts of Rayon Island…”

De Quincey, I’d like to think, had dimly foreseen it all. Setting sail for the Artificial Paradise, we are bound to hit the continent of Synthetica.
…
In the comments to the Dialectics of Diddling post, I commented, in relation to one of Amie’s comments about exploring Derrida’s Pharmacy of Plato, that I was thinking, rather, of orbiting it – but this made me curious about the geographic roots of the now very common idea that one “explores” a text. Etymologically, exploration is a very odd word – such as could have bloomed on the banks of the Formaldehyde river. In Rev. Walter Skeat’s Etymological dictionary, we read:
“Explore, to examine thoroughly. (F-L) M.E. In Cotgrave; and in Milton, P.L. ii 632, 971 – O.F. explorer, “to explore; Cot. Lat. Explorare, to search out, lit. ‘to make flow out’ – Lat. ex and plorare, to make to flow, weep. – PLU to flow; see flow.” (200)
With the lexicographer’s usual superb elisions, we are left to ask how “to make flow out’ or to ‘weep’, plus an out – ‘out of weeping’ - could give us, in the end, ‘examine thoroughly’. Perhaps in this world we do see as in a glass, darkly – and counteract our vision through our self created prism – like unto the sea of Glass, the world’s oldest plastic – our tears.
...
Juxtapositions and jump cuts. And geography. In De Quincey's Confessins, and indeed, in all of his writing, Wordsworth's line about being haunted by a landscape is transformed into a dreadful, hallucinatory truth about the way landscapes he has left, chance encounters in the street, a Malay sailor who came to his door one day in the country all extended themselves, repeated themselves endlessly, in his hallucinations - which is a truth seized upon, in turn, by Baudelaire's idea that the secret of the appeal of hashish and opium is a craving for infinity.

The landscape of infinity for De Quincey is London. Speaking of his honeymoon period on opium, De Quincey writes the he often used to ramble, stoned, through London neighborhoods, especially poor ones. He would see a myriad of faces (looking, perhaps, for the face of Ann, the prostitute who saved him when he was down and out) and scenes:

"Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed at times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities, moral and intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience."

It is worth underlining that last sentence - it was the very layout of the city that came to haunt his nightmares - or rather, nightmare united here to memory.

...

In Martin Booth’s Opium, Booth naturally turns to De Quincey’s Confessions, which is one of those rare ‘literary’ books that extended right out of the natural world of literature and into the world of opium sales – for De Quincey’s account of his addiction [years before the ‘morbid craving’ for morphine was studied by the doctors] gave the drug a lurid reputation. Booth writes: … it is surprising De Quincey does not mention the manner in which opium contorts or alters colours. In ordinary dreams, colourss (if they appear at all) are unenhnaced and realistic. In an opium dream, reds darken to maroons and blood crimsons, blues blacken to the colour of an early night sky, whilst yellows become solid and more luminescent. What is more, colours take on an almost tangible texture so the hue becomes only a part of their impact: one does not just see them, one feels them.” [38]

In Mielke’s account of the plastic industry in the thirties, color retention was one of the great factors driving research forward. Bakelite, the premier twenties plastic, fell behind its rivals because the process of synthesis disallowed a range of colors. It was phenolic resin ‘impervious to ultraviolet light’ which provided the first step towards creating materials “in all the colors of the rainbow’. ‘Catalin and other cast phenols arrived in time not only to take advantage of the rage for colors but also to stimulate it. The uncompromising artificiality of Catalin synthetic colors – bright, clear, uniform, reflecting a depth beyond that of a painted surface – contributed to an emerging commercial aesthetic of modernity.” [76]

the great law gift-gift

“…étranges croisements d'idiomes comme ceux qui
traduisent « se donner la mort » par « to take one's life ». Cette
inversion relève de la grande loi du Gift — gift.” – Derrida, Donner le temps



“Fundamentally, there is nothing less interesting than the life a morphine addict. It is limited to the periods in which he takes the poison, and periods, in which society forces him to give up the stuff. All the reasons that people have discovered to excuse addiction may work on the literary and poetic level: concretely it is sheer filthiness, because you are ruining your life with it. “ – Friedrich Glauser, Morphine (my translation)

Glauser was a Swiss detective novelist. He was enormously influential in that genre. He was also a sad case, a juvenile delinquent in Vienna, a druggy in Basel. According to his account, parts of which are published at this excellent site , he ‘started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff’ – or, less poetically, he found WWI so unbearable that he could no longer get drunk enough to forget it was happening.

I came to morphine through a detour. During the war, the daily need to ignore reality, even in neutral countries, was very strong. Since I could take even large quantities of alcohol without any problem, I sought other means, and began with ether. But his is an unpleasant poison. Its smell is hard to get rid of and remains as a penetrating taste in the mouth all day long. Also, ether attacks the lungs. During one cold night, I suffered an attack of bronchial bleeding, and had to search out a doctor at midnight. This man gave me a morphine injection, and had me drink concentrated saltwater.

I still remember exact the effect of this injection. Suddenly I became quite weak. A curious, hard to describe feeling of happiness “took possession of me” (one can hardly express it otherwise). In spite of that fact that, materially, this things were going badly with me, everything was suddenly changed, misery lost its importance, it was no longer present (vorhanden), I held happiness in my hands: it was, to make a bad comparison, as if my entire body was a smile. And then I lay there, awake, until morning.”

In the twenties, Glauser mixed up some hopeless affairs (“And yet another effect of opium and related poisons: they repress sexuality. I came to morphine after a bad love affair. In the ‘unconscious’ I made a conclusion and saved myself by regressing to a childhood stage, a sage, in which the business of dealing with the sensations of my own body had handed in the prize of pleasure.”) with stays in prison or clinics for the mentally ill, where he would set fires. Having happiness in his hands once, he wanted it again; and so the pursuit of happiness led him to the marginal life of the main chance.

To be marginalized in the pursuit of happiness, which one has found, as de Quincey says, in pill form – this is an anthropologically important social fact.

And one that leads to the direction of the pursuit – either inwards or outwards. Or, by some impossibility, can the inward become the outward?

The dialectics of diddling

IT – and I will interrupt the continuity of this post in the very first sentence to say that I, at least, refuse to identify the semi-autonomous heteronym, Infinite Thought, with the semi-autonomous philosopher, Nina, so this is about IT – recently wrote a post that makes an oblique but telling point against the current fashion for returning to things as they are via some kind of speculative realist ontology. As she notes, this gesture seems to go along with a taste for a politics that is so catastrophic as to be an excuse for no politics.

“proliferating ontologies is simply not the point - further, what use is it if it simply becomes a race to the bottom to prove that every entity is as meaningless as every other (besides, the Atomists did it better). Confronting 'what is' has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial. Ontology is play-science for philosophers; I'm pretty much convinced when Badiou argues that mathematics has better ways of conceiving it than philosophy does and that, besides, ontology is not the point. What happens, or what does not happen, should be what concerns us: philosophers sometimes pride themselves on their ignorance of world affairs, again like watered-down Heideggarians, no matter how hostile they think they are to him, pretending that all that history and politics stuff is so, like, ontic, we're working on something much more important here.”


Being the Derridean type, I expect that any attempt to create another, better ontology will produce the kinds of double binds that Derrida so expertly fished out of phenomenology. There have been a lot of replies to I.T.'s post. I thought the most interesting one was by Speculative Heresy, because he makes it clear that Speculative Realism is a return to a distinction that was popular among the analytic philosophers in the 50s, where a value neutral view of philosophy as a technique supposedly precluded the relevance of any political conclusions from conceptual analysis, and at worst blocked the advance of philosophy as a science. Here, the part of the natural is played by the question, which apparently asks itself in the void:


“Which is to say that philosophy and politics are born of two different questions: ‘what is it?’ and ‘what to do?’ The latter, political, question need never concern itself with the former question.”

IT rightly sees this reverence for the question in itself, and its supposedly fortunate alignment with the disciplines we all know and love, with their different mailboxes in the university, as a very Heideggerian gesture. And, as an empirical fact of intellectual history, it is very curious to think that a discipline is “born” from a syntactical unit peculiar to certain languages. Again, we run into a very old thematic, in which the question giving "birth" is entangled in the parallel series of logos and the body, in which each becomes a privileged metaphor for the other. There's nothing more political than this.

Still, when IT refers to Badiou, I – as always – baulk. On the one hand, it seems that she is taking Badiou to be reprising Quine’s pythagorianism, and on the other hand – from what I have read of Badiou – I have never quite understood why set theory or Dedekind's cut gives us an ontology that is purified of its double binds, of its perennial failure to shuck its textuality.

It isn't that I am wholly unsympathetic. To return not to Descartes but to Newton - the Newton of the glorious letters on the theory of light and color, with his attack on the whole idea of hypotheses - strikes me as a valid project. In the letter to Pardies, Newton writes,in response to Pardies attribution of his theory to a hypothesis:

"Tis true, that from my Theory I argue the Corporeity of Light; but I do it without any absolute positiveness, as the word perhaps intimates; and make it at most but a very plausible consequence of the Doctrine, and not a fundamental Supposition, nor so much as any part of it; which was wholly comprehended in the precedent Propositions. And I somewhat wonder, how the Objector could imagine, that, when I had asserted the Theory with the greatest rigour, I should be so forgetful as afterwards to assert the fundamental supposition it self with no more than a perhaps. Had I intended any such Hypothesis, I should somewhere have explain'd it. But I knew, that the Properties, which I declar'd of Light, were in <5087> some measure capable of being explicated not only by that, but by many other Mechanical Hypotheses. And therefore I chose to decline them all, and to speak of Light in general terms, considering it abstractly, as something or other propagated every way in streight lines from luminous bodies, without determining, what that Thing is; whether a confused Mixture of difform qualities, or Modes of bodies, or of Bodies themselves, or of any Virtues, Powers, or Beings whatsoever. And for the same reason I chose to speak of Colours according to the information of our Senses, as if they were Qualities of Light without us."

That is a decisive blow struck for an ontology of the variable, which is a tittilating thought. But I think IT retreats, here, from her more interesting insight into politics by holding that an ontology taken "care of" by mathematics is not political.


While it may seem that we are rowing away from politics, we are really rowing towards it. After all, what is the ‘catastrophe’ of the moment but a prevision of the wreck of our models, the main effects of our side effects. It is, after all, the success of the model in physics that has been the motive force and prompt of the proliferation of the model in economics. And it is here that one would like to see speculative realism show some teeth. One would like it to encounter Stanford nominalism – the work of the pupils of Patrick Suppes (John Dupre, Ian Hacking, Peter Galison and Nancy Cartwright). This school does have a distinct political orientation – or at least Dupre, Hacking and Galison seem to me to be close to a Foucaultian left.

Finally, I am putting this post about IT’s post on Limited Inc., instead of my News From the Zona blog, because of this part of her post: “Confronting 'what is' has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial.” I am using psychoactive substances not only because, as Mintz has argued, sugar – and I think you could extend this to tobacco - was the commodity around which the factory structure first takes hold, but also because the built environments of modernity exist not only in the streets we walk in but form part of the very bloodstream of our bodies. Our mood alteration drugs begin, very early, to shape our moods altogether. When Baudelaire uses drugs – haschisch, opium – as the keys to the artificial paradises, he has stumbled on an essential structure of modern artifice.

whose side are the side effects on?

In this spot, place, lieu, here, before I lift my pen – for I write these posts before I type them, and then, in typing them, watch them shift their shapes and burdens – I feel a rush, a lunge of citations and themes, as though, in the first sentence, at the entrance of the thing, the establishing period, everything must come tumbling out (as in some dopey comedy skit in which some target character X, laugh a minute X, opens some target door Y, boobytrapped Y, and the things behind it avalanche upon him or her). For surely I’ve reached the point in this long long course of things at which (in which?) suddenly the happiness culture, more a blueprint or a Platonic form, suddenly extrudes itself into the psychoactive, chemical phantasmagoria we are all familiar with, dosed with, prescribed, stoned and high on, chained to, attuned to deep in the immune system, our biochemistry altered in its ticking and secretions by the water we drink and the incredible array of chemicals, such as were never before on earth and never before metabolized by any terrestrial organism, that we have so casually strewed about every sphere of the planet.

And this even before I lay my hand on De Quincey’s text, which, though entitled the Confessions of an Opium Eater, could be entitled, Confessions of a side effect. For by De Quincey’s account, his opium addiction came about through the use of a palliative for pain. In fact, this is how Wilberforce, the abolitionist, became a lifelong opium addict. And of course we now live in the age of side effects and are advancing rapidly into a world in which the climate has been the victim of one of the hugest side effects ever. Meanwhile, who doesn’t know from personal experience or from a friend’s tale of the side effects of mood altering drugs – for every mental ill – ranging from biliousness and water retention to a total, catastrophic loss of sexual desire – all side effects. Or, as they are known in the industry, ADRs – adverse drug reactions.

And in this way, the building of the artificial paradise puts the question of the human limit in a different form: whose sides are these side effects on?