Zigzag

This is from Ashton’s The History of Gambling in England. It is what Ivan Karamazov would call an allegory. Yes, for LI, there is something about this story of drunken hanging that reminds me of the paired destiny of the buffoon and the sage, this thread that I have been following – into my own asshole, certain cruel readers might say. No – into even drier gulches of history than that.

"The Annual Register about this time supplies us with several gambling anecdotes, the following being almost incredible: 15th April, 1812 – “On Wednesday evening an extraordinary investigation took place at Bow Street. Croker, the officer, was passing along the Haampstead road, when he observed, at a short distance before him, two men on a wall, and , directly after, saw the tallest of them, a stout man, about six feet high, hanging by his neck, from a lamp post attached to the wall, being that instant tied up and turned off by the short man. This unexpected and extraordinary sight astonished the officer; he made up to the spot with all speed; and, just after he arrived there the tall man, who had been hanged, fell to the ground, the handkechief, with which he had been suspended, having given way. Croker produced his staff, said he was an officer, and demanded to know of the other man the cause of such conduct. In the meantime, the man who had been hanged recovered, got up, and, on Croker’s interfering, gave him a violent blow on the nose, which nearly knocked him backwards. The short man was endeavouring to make offl however, the officer procured assistance, and both were brout to the office, when the account they gave was that they worked on the canals. They had been together on Wednesday afternoon, tossed up for money, and afterwards for clothes; the tall man who was hanged,won the other’s jacket, trousers and shoes; they then tossed up which should hang the other, and the short one won the toss. They got upon the wall, the one to submit, and the other to hang him on the lamp iron. They both agreed to this statement. The tall one, who would have been hanged, said, if he had won the toss, he would have hanged the other. He said he then felt the effects of his hanging in the neck, and his eyes were so much swelled he saw double. The magistrates expressed their horror and disgust, and ordered the man who had been hanged to find bail for the violent and unjustifiable assault on the officer, and the short one for hanging the other. Not having bail, they were committed to Bridewell for trial.”

If the short man and the tall man weren’t named Estragon and Vladimir, fate missed a trick.

Surely it is odd that LI is railing, in these posts, against the buffoon, when this is the same LI that claims to be lead, as if by supernatural light of the muse of ludicrousness, through the shadow of the valley of the moronic inferno I call my own country, my life and times. However, what I want to know is why, of the sage and the buffoon, the moi and the lui of Rameau’s nephew, only the buffoon made it into the present – and how it came about that the sage has been so utterly throttled by circumstances. What was the toss about? What were the stakes? How did they meet (illmet) and how did they part (one alone)? So, these are the questions, which I’m laying out like a deck of cards in this game of solitaire.

The key to the conversation of Rameau’s nephew is shamelessness – that most dialectical of attitudes. Shamelessness not only assumes shame, but it also assumes innocence – but only as a supreme lie. The lie of innocence is embodied in the peculiar way in which Rameau’s nephew not only speaks, but pantomimes – as if word and act were indivisible, which is indeed how a child has to learn to speak. It is later that we ignore the act of the tongue. Yet the charm of the pantomime is fully intended – Rameau’s nephew is nothing if not intentional in all things, even as he is described as being self-contradictory and a ball of contradictions. Shamelessness has become his strategy – just as it is the strategy of Sade’s fuckers. Shamelessness, vanity and flattery are the circuit of acts and attitudes in which Rameau has his existence, and they collectively have a political value. One that is fairly new. The ideology of the old right, the legitimist or the Tory, is about tradition and order – but the new right, that represented by Rameau, is about provocation. What takes shape here is a foretaste of the system that dominates us now, the mixture of shamelessness and outrage by which we drift over the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and howl at, say, the nasty language of bloggers. To use the U.S. for one example – but the same thing happens in Italy, in France, in the U.K.

A couple more posts on this and then I have done.

two trillion dollars - where is that pesky wabbit?

As LI has written again and again and again, there is no war on terrorism, and President Backbone is its prophet. Nothing changed, for the White House, on 9/11. Not a damned thing. Garbage in has meant garbage, oh so much of it, out. So much movement around so much stasis. This lovely article from the NYT gives us an exciting glimpse into the future that was decided when the U.S. “allowed” Osama Who to escape in 2001. Now, let’s see. In the past six years, conservatively, the U.S. has spent two trillion dollars are “defense”, and Mr. Who has spent maybe a cool million or two becoming a video star. And the end result of that is, as anybody would have expected from the unparalleled criminality of our Little Caesars in D.C. – that Osama is becoming the Toyota of terrorists. Moving up fast!

As recently as 2005, American intelligence assessments described senior leaders of Al Qaeda as cut off from their foot soldiers and able only to provide inspiration for future attacks. But more recent intelligence describes the organization’s hierarchy as intact and strengthening.
“The chain of command has been re-established,” said one American government official, who said that the Qaeda “leadership command and control is robust.”
American officials and analysts said a variety of factors in Pakistan had come together to allow “core Al Qaeda” — a reference to Mr. bin Laden and his immediate circle — to regain some of its strength. The emergence of a relative haven in North Waziristan and the surrounding area has helped senior operatives communicate more effectively with the outside world via courier and the Internet.
The investigation into last summer’s failed plot to bomb airliners in London has led counterterrorism officials to what they say are “clear linkages” between the plotters and core Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. American analysts point out that the trials of terrorism suspects in Britain revealed that some of the defendants had been trained in Pakistan.

eine kleine Hegelmusik

In the Phenomenology, Hegel introduces some of the dialogue from Rameau’s nephew in the section on the “self alienated spirit”. Here, the social conditions that frame the dialectical image embodied, eventually, in the “myself” and “him” of the dialogue are State Power and Wealth. They inevitably impinge upon “Bildung” – education, the development of the intelligence (Einsicht) – and there is no resigning from them, or turning away from them. Since State Power and Wealth are, indeed, the spirits that preside over our current miseries, the current sad state of American culture, American aggression, American cluelessness – the whole D.C. daisy chain – the dialogue between the sage and the buffoon takes on a whole new relevance. One has only to read, say, in the Friday Washington Post a profile of Michelle Malkin by Howard Kurz entitled Hard Right Punch to see how the transaction between decency (o decency), the false transparency of the media, and buffoonery plays out in these dire days of the mock apocalypse, how we are invited to suffer, and do suffer, as comments galore demonstrate, for the victimization of the wealthy. In the course of the article, a homespun little piece in the genre of here's looking at you kid, it is reported that “after a few liberal sites posted her home address and phone numbers last year, Malkin received a wave of harassing calls. She responded with a defiant post, headlined "I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU." Malkin and her family have moved elsewhere in Maryland” jostles, without comment, next to this description of Malkin’s rise to notoriety: (“Malkin's detractors -- whom she derides as "moonbats" -- were further riled by her book "In Defense of Internment," in which she said the confining of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified, and backed racial profiling as a vital tool against terrorism”) The opinion is driven by, with the aplomb of a person who knows that he will never have to give up his house because of his race - ah, that wonderful superiority of it all. Of course, moving Japanese families out of their homes and behind barbed wire is a question that is up in the air – was it a good thing? a bad thing? and what is the ideological slant of those who are “riled” by the defense of it?. This is neutrality pleased at its own shamelessness, the view from nowhere that just happens to look exactly like the view from the cancer zone of the status quo, with its mortgages up the asshole and its soldier f/x on tv - this is the voice of the sage, except that the dividing line, the wall, has been lost that separates it from the voice of the buffoon. Or rather, the sage has become completely vacuous, found no relation to wealth and state power that would preserve its own in-itselfness, the potential to become a beggar in a brothel - no, rather the buffoon multiplies and becomes both the sage and the interviewee, the reporter and the provacateur, the producer and the propagandist, the politician and his campaign consultant. The orgy of the minimal self, armed with the orgy of the maximal weapon - such is the environment in which the sage has vanished.

Hegel sets the stage for the entrance of the buffoon – as I am calling this figure – by giving us a history of the relationship between the state and the noble spirit, which is the spirit of “heroic” service: (this is the J.N. Findley translation).

“State-power has, therefore, still at this stage no will to oppose the advice, and does not decide between the different opinions as to what is universally the best. It is not yet governmental control, and on that account is in truth not yet real state-power. Individual self-existence, the possession of an individual will that is not yet qua will surrendered, is the inner secretly reserved spiritual principle of the various classes and stations, a spirit which keeps for its own behoof what suits itself best, in spite of its words about the universal best, and tends to make this clap-trap about what is universally the best a substitute for action bringing it about. The sacrifice of existence, which takes place in the case of service, is indeed complete when it goes so far as death. But the endurance of the danger of death which the individual survives, leaves him still a specific kind of existence, and hence a particular self-reference; and this makes the counsel imparted in the interests of the universally best ambiguous and open to suspicion; it really means, in point of fact, retaining the claim to a private opinion of his own, and a separate individual will as against the power of the state. Its relation to the latter is, therefore, still one of discordance; and it possesses the characteristic found in the case of the base type of consciousness — it is ever at the point of breaking out into rebellion.”

In our case, us in these here states, the individual, at least the individual as interviewee, both promotes the risk society and survives it pretty well - as indeed do the soldiers who are privileged to fight for the interviewee. In fact, the win win only breaks down on the margines, with the fought-for - the terrorized/terrorist masses. They are, however, not interviewees, and so have an ambiguous status. Heroic service has become properly commoditized, and thus a new form of reconciliation between state power and the noble spirit becomes possible: state power pretends to be two things, a self-abnegating force that only wants to diminish itself into small government with all its heart and soul, and a universal abstraction representing liberty that requires being able to build enough missiles and host enough armed servicemen to destroy vast tracts of the world – while nobility becomes a mere position filled in by a meritocracy that embodies clap-trap (Geschwätze), which has found a way to make every sacrifice turns into profit in its hands – a miracle much more impressive than the loaves and the fishes.

Hegel supposes that the noble self, defining itself by a mortal sacrifice and thereby preserving itself, is genealogically precedent to the alienation of the self that is the condition of the rise of state power:

“It comes thereby to be actually what it is implicitly — the identical unity of self with its opposed self. In this way, by the inner withdrawn and secret spiritual principle, the self as such, coming forward and abrogating itself, the state-power becomes ipso facto raised into a proper self of its own; without this estrangement of self the deeds of honour, the actions of the noble type of consciousness, and the counsels which its insight reveals, would continue to maintain the ambiguous character which, as we saw, kept that secret reserve of private intention and self-will, in spite of its overt pretensions.” In this way we come to language in the age of the self-divided self – and to Rameau’s nephew. Which we will return to at some future post.

the setting

“No matter if the weather is fair or foul, it is my habit to talk a walk, at five in the evening, to the Palais-Royal.” This is how Diderot begins Rameau’s Nephew. With a walk.

For the sage, the regular walk is important. Kant, that indefatigable commenter on all things under the sun, noted the importance of the walk to the scholar in The Conflict of the Faculties under the heading: “On Pathological Feelings that Come from Thinking at Unsuitable Times”. “Thinking – whether in the form of study (reading books) or reflection (meditation and discovery) is a scholar’s food: and when he is wide awake and alone, he cannot live without it. But if he taxes his energy by occupying himself with a specific thought when he is eating or walking, he inflicts two tasks on himself at the same time – on the head and the stomach or on the head and the feet; and in the first place this brings on hypochondria, in the second, vertigo.” In a note, Kant distinguishes (Kant indefatiguably distinguishes – this guy is the very Prince of distinguishers) thinking from what should be occurring in the head of our non-multi-tasker during the walk: ‘When a man of studious habits goes for a walk alone, it is hard for him to refrain from entertaining himself with his own reflections. But if he engages in strenuous thinking during his walk, he will soon be exhausted, whereas if he gives himself over to the free play of imagination, the motion will refresh him – the reports of others whom I asked about this confirm my own experience. If in addition to thinking he also engages in conversation while he is walking, he will be even more fatigues, so that he will soon have to sit down to continue with his play of thought. The purpose of walking in the open air is precisely to keep one’s attention moving from one object to another and so to keep it from becoming fixed on any one object.” The Man in the Crowd might disagree with the prospect of health Kant holds out here, for it is precisely the habit of not becoming fixed on any one object, but on one after another, on the crowd itself, on a multiplication of objects, that has brought the man in Poe’s story down in the world – made him into a human fiend.

Diderot, on the other hand, is going off to the Palais-Royal, a section of Paris built up by the Regent, the Duc D’Orleans, containing shops, restaurants, and a garden. The theater of the Comedie Francaise was there – recently, Palissot’s play, Les Philosophes, which mocked, among others, Diderot, had been put on there – and Café de la Régence was located in the garden. There was a cannon in the garden, too, that was fired by means of the light focused by a large magnifying glass, to announce the hours – the kind of clever toy that delighted the enlightened soul. Mercier, in the Tableau of Paris, devotes a chapter to the Palais-Royal, which he claims is “precisely the spot which Plato would have assigned the captive, in order to retain him without a jailer, and without violence, by the voluntary chains of pleasure…” – which I believe is a distant reference to the myth of the cave. Mercier bemoans the fact that people walk in the Palais Royal when they could have much more philosophical walks in gardens of the Palace of Luxemberg – “Whilst the Palais Royal is crowded with courtesans and libertines, the Luxemburg presents a quiet philosophic walk, and is only frequented by honest citizens with their decent families.” No doubt, the Luxemburg would have been preferred by Kant – but this is the difference between Kant and the French philosophes.

The Café de la Régence, which is where Diderot ends up, meeting by chance the nephew of the famous musician, Rameau, was a famous spot for chess players. The greatest chess player of the time, Philador, played there. Paul Metzner, in his book, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill and Self Promotion in Paris during the age of revolution devotes a chapter to the chess players of the Café de la Regence. The place was owned by a chess amateur, M. de Kermur, sire de Légal: “For countless years he sat in the same chair and wore the same green coat, taking large quantities of snuff and attracting a crowd with his equally brilliant conversation and combinations. He had already established his reputation as the best in France when Philidor first walked into the Regence in 1740, and he continued playing into the 1780s, his own eighties, without ever having to acknowledge a superior, although he lost at least one match.” Philidor learned how to play blindfold matches from Legal, although the latter did not often do this himself.

Well, now we have a setting for the dialogue.

sage and buffoon

I’ve been lining up sages, as you might have noticed. This is because I have a hunch that the sage and the buffoon share a destiny. I’m interested in the sage since I am at an age - middle age - a lying description because tomorrow, surely, or the next day, biking along, my backbone will be suddenly crushed in a blinding moment by a speeding truck driven by a hit and run drunk, I will see blackness, and then go down to the house of shades – when the sage should become important to me. And yet, to aspire to be a sage is such an obsolete and pathetic wish, the placeholder of that figure is so null and void in this culture, so completely disregarded, so much a joke moniker for some greyhaired keeper of baseball statistics or some fat brownnosing pundit oozing conventional wisdom and cancer, that it can only be a punch line ambition. (Well, so much for this culture, to which I give my middle finger). To my mind, the absence of the sage is not some natural event, but is all about that path through politics and history which the sage and the buffoon shared.

And having this obsession, I am naturally draw to Rameau’s nephew. For there the sage – moi – and the buffoon – lui – truly did meet. There are some odd and sinister things in that dialogue.

But this post will be about the backstory, the strange history of this text. While Diderot seems to have started it in the early 1760s, and polished it intermittently up until the mid 1770s, there is no mention of this text in the correspondence. That isn’t like Mr. D. The first we hear about it is after Diderot’s death. Schiller has a copy of the ms., which he gives to Goethe to translate. Goethe translates the ms., and then carelessly tosses it away. How did Schiller get it? Rumor has it that it was given to him by a German officer who came into possession of it in St. Petersburgh. Meanwhile, there is no published French version. Finally one comes out, published by a press run by “Le Vicomte de Saur” and “Le Compte de Saint-Geniès”, who seem to have been like Huckleberry Finn’s Duke and Dauphin. Their version, which they claimed came from an original manuscript, obviously was translated from Goethe. A rival publisher, one Brière, decides to publish a real version, so he applies to Diderot’s daughter, who gives him a manuscript. He publishes it, and in the process loses the ms. There is a flurry of charges and countercharges between the two publishers, but in the end, it looks like we will have to settle for the Brière version – when one Georges Monval, apparently looking for spicy books, comes upon it in the box of a bookseller in 1891. Always remember that, for most people, Diderot is still the author of one of the great fuckbooks, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, about a magic ring that could make a woman’s pussy talk. Anyway, this is the official Rameau we now all read.

In that transit, Rameau had come to the attention of Hegel. Hegel does a good job of pissing around the work in the Phenomenology. As we know, Hegel was a world champion pisser – he marked, with his gargantuan pizzle, all of world history, for instance. We have all dutifully followed him into the pissoir of the system, but we will never quite manipulate an instrument like the Man’s – and nobody else will, either.

We’ll start with Hegel when, in another post, we return to this subject.

among barbarians, do what is proper among barbarians

Li Zhi was a Chinese scholar of the Ming period, a contemporary of Yuan Hongdao, (about whom see LI’s Valentine’s Day post). He grew skeptical of the official Confucian doctrine of the day, and wrote books with titles like “A book for burning” – a title that prophesized the book’s fate. Chronologically, his life roughly parallels Giordano Bruno’s. This is from one of his letters:

“When most people write they strive to enter their subject by pushing into it from the outside; hereas I am already in there and make sorties to the outside, carrying the battle under the walls of the enemy, rummaging in his supplies, turning his own men and horses against him.”

Li is famous for, among other things, an essay entitled “Childlike Mind”. Here’s a quote from that essay:

Once people’s minds have been given over to received opinions and moral principles, what they have ot say is all about these things, and not what would naturally come from their childlike minds. No matter how clever the words, what have they to do with oneself? What else can there be but phony men speaking phony words, doing phony things, writing phony writings? Once the men become phonies, everything becomes phony. Thereafter, if one speaks phony talk to the phonies, the phonies are pleased; if one does phony things as the phonies do, the phonies are pleased; and if one discourses with the phonies through phony writings, the phonies are pleased. Everything is phony, and everyone is pleased.

Further, he writes: “… the best in literature always came from the childlike mind, and if the childlike mind continued to exist in this way, moral principles would not be practiced, received impressions would not stand up, and the writing of any age, any man, any form, any style, and any language would all be accepted as literature.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that a man who looks forward to the spontaneous society was considered a dangerous man. In fact, after putting away his wife and children – the usual cutting off of family ties of the male Chinese sage – Li published many pamphlets and essays that steadily cut into Confucian doctrine. In the Confucian system, the primary relationship was the parent-child relationship. For Li, the primary relationship was the husband-wife relationship. As his commentator, Theodore de Barry, from whose account of Li in Learning for Oneself: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian thought, I've taken my quotes, says: … on the basis of the irreducibility of the male and female principles represented by yin and yang, Li denies the existence of any first principle at all.” Li’s notions made him object to the whole patriarchal structure of Chinese society. Even though he believed in the traditional gender stereotypes – the female principle being intuitive, the male rational – he wrote in his letters that the distribution of these principles in actual people was indifferent to sex – men and women, in his view, were intellectually equal. However, of all relationships, the one that counted most for Li was friendship – and even that, he believed, was not going to hold out until the end. This threw Li back on loneliness as an object of his supreme meditations – which is, paradoxically, the endpoint that awaits a number of related philosophic doctrines: the epicurian-materialist-libertine line in particular. You can see it in the Greek pre-socratics, in Sade, in Nietzsche – this movement to a solitude in which the self falls ill. The illness is a necessary metaphysical illness, a leaching into the bone of that colorless, odorless gas, thought thinking thought. This is, of course, the whole point – the point is to test the self against the greatest degree of loneliness, and see what happens. In Li’s case, apparently, he combined the hedonism of the libertines (he was by no means a celibate monk) with the idea of going further until, in 1600, in response to his revisionist history of China, a mob gathered and burned his house. Being a man with a witty sense of the title, he had called his history ‘A book to be hidden away.” In 1602, the government acted. The court ordered his books to be burnt. Li was put in prison, and committed suicide by cutting his throat.

“ The noble man accords with his station in life and does not desire to go beyond it.

In a position of wealth and honor he does what is proper to a position of wealth and honor. In a poor and low position, he does what is proper to a poor and low position. Situated among barbarians, he does what is proper among barbarians. In a situation of sorrow and difficulty, he does what is proper in sorrow and difficulty. The noble man can find himself in no situation in which he is not himself.”

Neither science nor art

What is journalism, anyway? Is it an art? A science? A mixture?

LI has had an overwhelmed feeling – the heart thrashing around in the socks feeling – for the last week about the fucking awful coverage of the Bush administration charges against Iran. That the charges were made by anonymous sources so that they could be echoed by the President is obvious to any sentient being. This is how the White House operates – like a peckerwood junta planning a small town lynching. However, LI is naïve enough to be truly grieved that the Washington Post and the New York Times would cooperate in this business, again.

The form of the newspaper developed in the eighteenth century, which was the high water mark of Baconian science. Jevons, the nineteenth century economist, did not think highly of Bacon, and made an attack on Baconian science in The Principles of Science that damaged Bacon’s reputation for a generation. It is striking that the case against Bacon, as Jevons puts it, is so similar to the case against journalism. In Jevon’s view, Baconian science a., mischaracterizes experiments (‘I take the extreme view of holding that Francis Bacon, although he correctly insisted upon constant reference to experience, had no correct notions as to the logical method by which from particular facts we educe laws of nature), and b., had no sense of pattern – that is, he advocated the indiscriminate accumulation of facts, out of which he supposed we could induce a pattern (“Bacon’s method, as far as we can gather the meaning of the main portions of his writings, would correspond to the process of empirically collecting facts and exhaustively classifying them, to which I alluded. The value of this method may be estimated historically by the fact that it has not been followed by any of the great masters of science.”) Now, LI is not as much of a positivist about the inductive method as Jevons, but we do think that Jevons has hit on the image and practice of science in the eighteenth century in the main. Its sole continuation is in the newspaper. Jevon’s notion of Bacon’s method is, almost literally, what you will read in newspapermen who deal with the meta issue – people like Howard Kurz. The notion of “bias” – of a journalist being liberal or conservative – corresponds to the deeper, Baconian fear of hypothesis. The facts, in news parlance, are supposed to speak for themselves.

Given this fear of bias, journalists by and large are easily driven into being the sewer pipe for whatever nonsense the ruling class dreams up. The trick, the childish but apparently neverfailing trick, is the pretence that the ruling class wetdream is actually the height and depth of centrism. Centrism is the vague substitute for hypothesis for the journalist. And centrism is a felt quality – you feel it when you are: white; male; and make above 100,000 dollars per year. You don’t have to possess any of those three qualities, but if you don’t possess them, you have to mime them.

So: looking at the truly awful reporting about Iran in the last seven days, one is struck by how easy it is, given the Baconian presuppositions of the journalist, to go forward into pure fiction. Take the example of the supposed arms acquired, somehow, by the militias from Iran, and then acquired, somehow, by anonymous army officers. To understand this fact within a pattern, one should ask, firstly, more general questions about the acquisition of arms on all sides. This simple question, however, isn’t asked at all. It is one thing that (granting the truth of the dubious evidence for a moment), Iran is sending weapons into Iraq, and it is another thing if Iran as well as Saudi Arabia and other Sunni gulf states is sending weapons into Iraq. If our own little democratic, freedom lovin’ ally, Saudi Arabia is doing it (the same Saudi Arabia whose sandy hindquarters were recently licked, so copiously and deliciously, by Tony Blair, the poodle Tartuffe), we have a different sense of arms flow into Iraq. We have a larger pattern. Similarly, there is the problem that the Iraqi government, which is, or at least which we pretend to think is, sovereign in Iraq is allied to the Iranian government. Now, even from a Baconian point of view, these two parameters should be included in the reporting about Iran’s arms. They aren’t. They are, in fact, rigidly excluded. Thus, not only do we have newspapers operating with an antiquated scientific methodology, but even by the terms of that methodology, they are failing.

There are many reasons that newspapers are struggling nowadays, but one of them, surely, is the unconscious perception that newspapers simply don’t have a methodology to do what they do. They don’t have a sense of pattern, they don’t have a sense of hypothesis, they don’t have a sense of experiment, they don’t see the connection between questions, they don’t construct coherent and cohesive scenes of inquiry, and they serve as the most abject and servile means of power in its grossest and most malignant incarnation, all the while claiming an innocence at some distance from the swollen recompense accorded its most unscrupulous representatives.

This isn’t good.