Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!

Peter Watkins made his film, La Commune, which was a sort of recreation of the Paris Commune of 1870, with a cast of amateur actors. These were regular people, mostly unemployed, who had responded to his casting call, and they were supposed to not only play their parts in the film, but think about the action and, in a sense, re-animate the spirit of the Commune. The film shuttles back and forth between the reality of making the film, including interviews with the actors, and scenarios plucked from actual history.

At the end of the movie, as at the end of the Commune, the forces of order – the French army of the Third Republic – move into Paris, sweeping past barricades and massacring Communards, while the Communards massacre prisoners in turn. A contemporary reporter noted that the “last red flag that floated for the Commune was at a barricade at the Rue Fontaine au Roi, where, after a feeble defense it was surrendered at 11 a.m.” May 28, 1871. In a similar scene at the end of the film, the actors, who by this time seemed to be having difficulty distinguishing between their real life and their 1871 lives, are manning a barricade that is being attacked by troops, and they suddenly spontaneously start singing the Marseillais. It is an incredible moment, a moment of true terribilità – it is as though the scene in 1871 really did escape from the long chain of time to merge with the one being filmed.

Which brings me to the thread I’ve been threading re art and subversion. La Marseillaise, in 1871, had a certain dread power partly because it had been banned under Louis Napoleon. And yet, in 1870, when war was declared against Prussia – all those people streaming through the streets under Nana’s window, yelling “onto Berlin” – the song broke out spontaneously in crowds and in cafes. It was an indicator of the kind of patriotism that Napoleon III could ill afford – it pointed to a crack in the regime, which had always been dogged by an aura of illegitimacy.

So – if we are looking for the complex of art and subversion and censorship, this is one place to find it.

There’s a history of La Marseillaise by Michel Vovelle here. We are going to write more about this in our next post.

Did Noah know about simple suspended animation techniques?

The Werepoet has posted the conservopedia entry on kangaroos, which brought a tear to my eye – for in the end, if I am for anything, I am for surrealistic science. Apparently, the conservopedia operates like a huge vacuum, scouring the web for the most ridiculous information that it can find and putting it in presentable form, suitable for LGF commentors and the like. I am so into this!

So this post is dedicated to the latest scientific investigation of Noah’s ark. Science has always found Noah’s ark a puzzle. On the one hand, God’s word says Noah built an ark and assembled all the animals, two by two – so we have some firm facts to go on. But how did Noah feed the animals, and keep them from eating each other?

The answer may come from “S.A., crypto-suspended animation in inverterbrates by Dr. Axel Kroeger and Dr. Nicalaus Swiboda in the Acta Oto-Biblica Vol. 10, issue 4 (2006), the premier journal of Bible based natural science out of Uppsala, Poland. Kroeger and Swiboda reproduced ark-like conditions by sealing off the Olympic sized swimming pool at the Holiness Temple College (where they both work in the endosynchrology department) and building a beaverwood structure to float on the pool. The two captured insects, perhaps the most difficult animal Noah and his family had to deal with. Using a simple to construct dry ice machine, using lumber from Mount Arak’s famous balsa trees and a simple combination of ice, sulphur, copper, tooth enamel, dew and fire, Drs. Kroeger and Swiboda demonstrated conclusively that the insects could be put into a state of suspended animation for up to two weeks. This, incidentally, made them much easier to stack. These results have been confirmed by scientists at M.I.T., Harvard and Oxford.

Please, readers, pass this around. LI wants to add a little something to the Conservopedia. One tiny step for an idiot, but a giant leap for the idiocy of all mankind!

a killer style

In Wooden Eyes, Carlo Ginzberg begins his essay on Style with an exemplary story, a little trouvaille. In 1605, the Venetian Republic jailed two priests, thus setting off a long dispute with the Holy See. On the Venetian side, the main polemicist was a monk, Paolo Sarpi. In 1607, Sarpi was ambushed near his monastery by a number of men with knives, who stabled him repeatedly. ‘Sarpi, gravely wounded, whispered to the doctor who was tending him that, as everyone knew, the wounds have been caused ‘stylo Romanae cuiaa’ – that is, by the knife of the Roman curia, but also by the legal procedures [literally, by the stylus or pen] of the Roman Curia.”
Style kills. And what kills, in human affairs, usually falls under the category of the political, insofar as politics is war pursued by other means. LI has been thinking about this in relation to the topic we pursued in a couple of posts last week – subversion in art.

To reprise: Sociologically, it is funny that art’s subversiveness has become a critical commonplace and an unthinking plaudit in the same era that the official social mechanism recognizing subversiveness in art – censorship – has been reduced or transformed. Without a specific censor’s judgment to guide the critic, subversion in a piece of art – the Chocolate Jesus, V for Vendetta, etc. - now takes only the largest and vaguest objects – language, capitalism, patriarchy, while its subversive quality has become a sort of good housekeeping seal – as if there were something aesthetically positive about subversion itself. In fact, subversion has been seen as such an all encompassing good that I’ve read more than one critic say that all art is subversive. And who questions that? or that subversion is a good in itself?

One of the liberal commonplaces about censorship is that censorship is essentially dumb. That is, the censors are always censoring the trivial or the inconsistent, and never catching the clever, subversive things put in by artists that send out special messages to the audience. The implication is that art does not consist just of parts that can be blacked out or not. Rather, there are other things at work – like style. How does one censor a style?

Ezekial on the mortgage crisis

Because the Fed cleverly found a way to bypass accounting for the inflation in the housing market, we’ve been in a strange situation, econometrically speaking, in the last ten years: both dependent on that inflation (the Fed assiduously fed that bubble) and pretending, for official purposes, that it doesn’t exist. Now LI doesn’t necessarily think feeding a bubble is wrong. Cheney, that monster of depravity out of a theater of cruelty production, was right about one thing when he said, to some conservative bemoaning the fact that the Bush budget was awash in red ink, that deficits don’t matter. By which he meant that nobody has ever gotten voted out of office in these here states cause of a stinkin’ deficit. We were founded by bankrupts and we aren’t fooled by suits – we know the wild west lurks under the surface of Wall Street. Deficits are good things in times of recession. If there is one lesson in affluence we all learned in the 30s, it was to borrow to keep demand up when you have a classic depression: too many goods and services, too little demand. The reality of that is tiresome for economists, who believe, as Robert Lucas once put it, in Say’s law as a parameter of intelligibility. The problem, of course, is what the Bush administration borrowed for. It is one thing to go in debt to build a house; quite another to go into debt to burn a house down. Non-creative destruction is the Bushite creed.

The real difference, broadly speaking, between the EU’s economy and ours is that we employ Keynsian economics to prop up a conservative politics, while the EU employs a neo-classical fiscal policy to prop up legacy socialism. The EU fear of inflation overrides its good sense, and the American advice to the EU is always to … Americanize. Destroy the unions, create a vastly more unequal distribution of wealth, etc., etc. It is terrible advice, and we doubt that even Sarkozy, that menace, will take it, although he claims to be eager to sick Thatcherism on France. For both the EU and the US, policy is an expression of structure. The EU can actually afford more unemployment, having a perfectly good social welfare system. The U.S has a perfectly good social welfare system for unemployment too: it’s called jail. Between prison and education, the U.S. can keep a goodly numbered of the able bodied off the employment roles without anybody calling a foul. Still, having less, shall we say, strata of social welfare, and having a criminally weak labor sector, the U.S. has become, out of necessity, a sort of virtual economy – the first economy in which credit has so totally penetrated the economic mindset that it has erased longstanding definitional differences between savings and investment, along with the remnants, in the 19th century, of the need to make money correspond to some standard of value. Money is now simply an excuse for credit, secondary to it, a sidekick. As we have often emphasized, having no power to extract wage increases from capital, the mass of Americans just borrow their wage increase. This should make them ever alert for better paying jobs, but for all the talk about the mobility of Americans, the figures don’t show a lot more mobility now than there was twenty years ago. After all, to quit means quitting, among other things, your medical benefits.

Which is why a specter haunts U.S. capitalism: foreclosure.

We thought these grafs from this article in the NYT this weekend worth quoting:

“A study conducted by Kristopher Gerardi and Paul S. Willen from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton, Do Households Benefit from Financial Deregulation and Innovation? The Case of the Mortgage Market (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12967), shows that the three decades from 1970 to 2000 witnessed an incredible flowering of new types of home loans. These innovations mainly served to give people power to make their own decisions about housing, and they ended up being quite sensible with their newfound access to capital.
These economists followed thousands of people over their lives and examined the evidence for whether mortgage markets have become more efficient over time. Lost in the current discussion about borrowers’ income levels in the subprime market is the fact that someone with a low income now but who stands to earn much more in the future would, in a perfect market, be able to borrow from a bank to buy a house. That is how economists view the efficiency of a capital market: people’s decisions unrestricted by the amount of money they have right now.
And this study shows that measured this way, the mortgage market has become more perfect, not more irresponsible. People tend to make good decisions about their own economic prospects. As Professor Rosen said in an interview, “Our findings suggest that people make sensible housing decisions in that the size of house they buy today relates to their future income, not just their current income and that the innovations in mortgages over 30 years gave many people the opportunity to own a home that they would not have otherwise had, just because they didn’t have enough assets in the bank at the moment they needed the house.”

“The size of house they buy today relates to their future income…” What a phrase! To unscrew the top of it, and peer inside, one definitely needs to be a poet or a prophet.

a might have been

I think LI will be the first to point out the perhaps saddest part of the whole prosecutor scandal is a might-have-been. Just imagine: it is August, 2001. CIA operators have flown down to Crawford, Texas. They present the evidence they have that Al qaeda has representatives in the U.S. who are preparing to attack. Now, imagine that they had added – these al qaeda terrorists are so evil that they are prepared to help - listen to this part, please, no, don't start testing your power saw yet, Mr. President - they might - please, can you hear me over the noise of that thing? Please. Okay. They might be trying to help disenfranchised black males register to vote!

We know what would happen. We know how President Backbone leaps into action when the Republic is threatened. Like Superman emerging from Clark Kent, or Venus from the foam of the sea. Instead of writing in his diary, for that day, "Nuthin happned. Shure is ez being presnident. Bush Rulez! In the House” – there would, instead, have been midnight oil burned at the Justice department. The FBI director would have put out a memo. The search would be on. Say what you want, when the President wants something done, he knows how to shake up the bureaucracy to do it!

the golden hairs of her armpits...

"Et, lorsque Nana levait les bras, on apercevait, aux feux de la rampe, les poils d’or de ses aisselles."


Nana attaching itself by a hundred strings to a prearranged table of kinships, heredities, transmissions, is the vast crowded epos of the daughter of the people filled with poisoned blood and sacrificed as well as sacrificing on the altar of luxury and lust; the panorama of such a “progress’ as Hogarth would more definitely have named – the progress across the high plateau of pleasure and down the facile descent on the other side.” – Henry James.


Offenbach’s career is neatly divided by 1870. In that year, he had to disappear from France for a while, since he was originally from Germany. The collapse of Napoleon III’s court, and the Second Empire, and the commune, and the establishment of the third republic created, at least for a while, a puritanical atmosphere in which Offenbach’s operas were looked upon as symptoms of decay, if not causative agents in themselves. And of course there was the matter of Offenbach’s connections in the imperial entourage.

Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels not only portray the corruption working through the genealogical tree of one family, but – by implication – the corruption that, on a macro level, brought about Le Debacle – France’s defeat at the hands of a surging Germany. On last page of Nana, in which Zola puts an end to her with that favorite of sentimental novelists, the unmentionable disease, one hears, in the streets, the stir and celebration of the crowds, receiving the news that war has been declared. Madness mirrors madness.

“A red crust, parting from the cheek, invaded the mouth, spread in an abominable smile. And on that horrible and grotesque mask of nothingness, the hair, the beautiful hair, guarding its solar like flames, flowed in a stream of gold. Venus decomposed. It seems that the virus she caught in the sewer, on all those tolerated corpses, this ferment by which she had empoisoned a whole people, had mounted to her face and utterly corrupted it.
The room was empty. A great desperate wind came up from the boulevard and swelled the curtain.
- To Berlin! To Berlin!”

Momento Mori and all that – death being the moralist’s great hat trick.

This, then, is Zola’s judgment on the subversive content of Offenbach’s operas – for subversion buttressed the order by creating a space in which all that was solid melted into money, and money became both a value and the mocker of all value.

Es gab alles, alles! Das hinderte nicht, daß sich die meisten wie Sarcey durch die Operette in ein Traumreich entführt glaubten. Sie träumten selber. Wären sie wach gewesen, so hätten sie (…) die unwahrscheinliche Wirklichkeit ihres Daseins wiedererkannt. – Kracauer

“It had everything, everything! But that didn’t get in the way of the fact that most, like Sarcey [a critic] felt themselves enticed by the operetta into a dreamland. They dreamed themselves. If they had been awake, they would have recognized… the improbably reality of their own existences.”

In European history, there were three occasions, that I can think of, in which the theater really played an important political role: The Marriage of Figaro, The Three Penny Opera, and the two mytho-farces of Offenbach, Orpheus in Hell and Beautiful Helen. In all three instances, a society went to see itself unmasked – and found the spectacle terribly funny. One of the inspirations for Canetti’s Crowds and Power was the opening night of the Three Penny Opera:

“It was the exactest expression of this Berlin. The people were howling up themselves, this was what they were and they were happy about it. Erst kam ihr Fressen, dann kam ihre Moral – nobody could have said it any better, they took it literally… Against the sweet forms of the Viennese operetta, in which the people could calmly find everything that they wished, here was another, which put on a Berliner form, with all its hardness, rascality and banal justifications, that they wanted no less than, and probably more than that sweetness.”

The dreamworlds in which the dreamers become aware of what they are wishing for batter against the constitutive principle of dreaming, at least according to Freudian theory. The dream takes its form from condensation, from the active intervention of the censor on the wish and that glitch in the libido's program: it can't say no. Dreams, in other words, require a latent content, an opacity. This is how the human dreamer humanly dreams. Otherwise, we get … animals. And the movement is, indeed, to the animal here, at least with Zola and Canetti.

That there is censorship outside of dreams, in the state or the corporation, is an important social evidence for the felt notion that art can be subversive in some manner – can corrupt morals or overthrow institutions. But this social evidence is, LI would contend, about the whole art system – no one work operates to subvert faith in the state, the gods, or money. So that rare moment when one work seems to have gathered into itself, by some genius, a real look at ‘what we are and why we are well pleased with ourselves’ – those are definitely worth looking at. Especially as their prestige has been lent, by a multitude of critics, to the drabbest and most commonplace of movies, books, paintings and novels.

Well, let’s end this with the beginning from Nana. Zola obviously bases Nana’s first appearance as Venus on Offenbach’s La Belle Helene. Here’s one translation:

“The traditional three knocks were given, and among the returning throng, attendants, laden with pelisses and overcoats, bustled about at a great rate in order to put away people’s things. The clappers applauded the scenery, which represented a grotto on Mount Etna, hollowed out in a silver mine and with sides glittering like new money. In the background Vulcan’s forge glowed like a setting star. Diana, since the second act, had come to a good understanding with the god, who was to pretend that he was on a journey, so as to leave the way clear for Venus and Mars. Then scarcely was Diana alone than Venus made her appearance. A shiver of delight ran round the house. Nana was nude. With quiet audacity she appeared in her nakedness, certain of the sovereign power of her flesh. Some gauze enveloped her, but her rounded shoulders, her Amazonian bosom, her wide hips, which swayed to and fro voluptuously, her whole body, in fact, could be divined, nay discerned, in all its foamlike whiteness of tint beneath the slight fabric she wore. It was Venus rising from the waves with no veil save her tresses. And when Nana lifted her arms the golden hairs in her armpits were observable in the glare of the footlights.”

It is rather funny that even now the translation above, on an etext server in Australia, is censored. After the Amazonian bosom Zola writes: “sa gorge d’amazone dont les pointes roses se tenaient levées et rigides comme des lances” – but the nipple talk was all too much for the English translators all the way up to the sixties. To LI, however, the most important part of this description is the golden hairs of the armpits. Which I will return to, I hope.

Oh, and do go to the Mery Laurent page where I stole my photograph of la belle Helene.

the art in subversion

One must have ideas and tunes that are as genuine as hard cash. – Offenbach

Offenbach has always had heavy fans – Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Kracauer. Kracauer wrote about Orphee aux enfers, the first Offenbach opera to mock the Gods, that in it Offenbach was calling out to the bourgeoisie:

“Confess that you are just as bored as the gods, and follow the lead that they are giving. What was the lead the gods were giving? They were setting about making a revolution… And so that their anger might be given a thorough contemporary note, the orchestra [strikes] up the Marseillaise, which in the days of the Second Empire was very definitely a revolutionary song. The challenge was plain enough.” (Quoted in Michael Chanon, from Handel to Hendrix)

Of course, boredom is a two edged butter knife, and if we make revolution from boredom, what will we do when we are bored with revolution?

Kracauer, thank god, lived in the days before the verb subvert entered the critical vocabulary like a radical chic diva. LI has read with interest – although not with a complete thoroughness, since it was sometimes hard to keep up with all the threads – Le Colonel Chabert’s many sword fights on her own site and the Parodycenter concerning 300, a movie LI is never going to see, as it sounds infinitely boring, and some David Lynch movies, which we might see, and Baudrillard, who we are bracketing or we will drown in themes. What interests us is the set of assumptions that circulate around the convergence of politics and art. We are interested because we find that, mostly, these discussions make art subservient to politics, which we strongly disagree with, while at the same time pursuing a sort of mock politics through art, which we find, to say the least, a funny way to engage in politics. Not that this is new, of course - these themes are as old as the Second International. Anyway, LCC’s comments reminded us a bit of the problem Zola had with Offenbach. All of which fits into our fait divers theme, in its own odd way.

The beginning of Nana is a rather scathing description of La Belle Helene, which you can see in these youtube clips: here (I love Paris in this clip!) and then follow the thread. Zola called it La Blonde Vénus and he had every reason to begin Nana’s adventures here. Those who love their Zola will recall that Nana was first seen as a little girl with daring eyes who watches her Mom go to bed with her lover, who is renting a room from the family, while her father lies in a drunken stupor in his own vomit on his bedroom. If you read the Penguin translation of Nana, Douglas Parmee, who introduces it, writes Offenbach… “whose witty subversion of the regime Zola quite failed to grasp, viewing him instead, with great distaste, purely as the impudent representative of frothy frivolity.” Subversion, subversion, and the failure to grasp it (or its failure to grasp) being at the heart of the LCC controversy, we thought it might be interesting to ask what about a wholly other era and genre – although one that involves Greeks and their mythology – whether Zola failed to grasp subversion, here, or loathed it in the grasping.

Which is something we will revisit in another post.