What's so funny?

We mortals are forced, though it may hurt us
to bear the gifts of the gods. For the yoke lies on our necks. – Homeric hymn to Demeter

Herodotus recorded the obscure origin of today’s schoolboy insult: “He tells us that Sesostris, king of Egypt, raised columns in some of the countries that he conquered, on which he caused to be figured the female organ of generation as a mark of contempt for those who had submitted easily,” according to Knight’s discourse on the worship of priapus. But as Knight adds: May not these columns have been intended, if we knew the truth, as protections for the peole of the district in which they stood, and placed in the position where they could most conveniently be seen?”



Speaking of the female organ of generation gets us to the second myth that figures in Vernant’s essay: Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, figure of the Other. I want to place this myth next to Athena throwing away the flute – consider them as two paintings. This is the myth of Ceres and Baubo.

Some background: when Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, was ravished by the God of the underworld, Ceres went wandering about the world in mourning. Thus, she came to the small village of Eleusis. And, as we know from Arnobius, one of the Christian father’s who quoted at length from the Orphic hymns in order to discredit them (thus preserving them – such are the unexpected results of hatred), the scene in Eleusis consisted of some peasant swineheards and huts, in one of which Demeter entered to rest. The old woman in the hut, Baubo, sees that the goddess is in pain. She offers her some spiced wine. Here’s the translation from Arnobius, which seems a bit bowdlerized:

“The goddess in her sorrow turns away from the kindly offered services, and rejects them; nor does her misfortune suffer her to remember what the body always requires.16 Baubo, on the other hand, begs and exhorts her—as is usual in such calamities—not to despise her humanity; Ceres remains utterly immoveable, and tenaciously maintains an invincible austerity. But when this was done several times, and her fixed purpose could not be worn out by any attentions, Baubo changes her plans, and determines to make merry by strange jests her whom she could not win by earnestness. That part of the body by which women both bear children and obtain the name of mothers,16 this she frees from longer neglect: she makes it assume a purer appearance, and become smooth like a child, not yet hard and rough with hair. In this wise she returns16 to the sorrowing goddess; and while trying the common expedients by which it is usual to break the force of grief, and moderate it, she uncovers herself, and baring her groins, displays all the parts which decency hides;16 and then the goddess fixes her eyes upon these,16 and is pleased with the strange form of consolation. Then becoming more cheerful after laughing, she takes and drinks off the drought spurned before, and the indecency of a shameless action forced that which Baubo's modest conduct was long unable to win.”

Now, the question for LI is: why did Demeter find Baubo’s flashing her so funny? Part of the joke that doesn’t come through in the Arnobius account is that Baubo painted the face of a man on her belly. That’s sorta funny. But what is the joke about flashing? Apparently, it is an important one. In Laurie O’Higgins Women and Humor in Classical Greece, there is a whole chapter on cultic obscenity emphasizing all women cults and the apparent ritual of obscene jests and sketches that enlivened reverencing the goddess. Of course, according to O’Higgins, the philosophers were intent on curbing this kind of obscenity – just as Athene throws away her flute, because it makes her cheeks bulge out when she blows into it. Actually, Aristotle reads this as a commentary on the wildness associated with the pipes. O’Higgins points to the festival of the Thesmophoria, a celebration of Demeter in which women in Athens temporarily separated from men, built huts and celebrated the Goddess. Obviously, the Baubo story indicates what the jokes were about. But LI doesn’t understand the joke in the first place. So we will come back to this in another post, and use that most inappropriate of all instruments, reason, to try to take apart the meaning of the joke.

Gorgo Head, Gorgo Head, what are you doin' round my bed?

The fragments I wanted to put together this week were all about genitalia and racism. That is, starting off with Aristotle’s reference to the perils of playing the flute in the Politics and going to Vernant’s essay on what made Demeter laugh when an old woman hiked up her skirt and showed her her privates. Vernant has a theory about Gorgo, the genital face, and the Other, and I think this is a good time to go down the trail with him, from whence we will all return refreshed and Freudened. But this week might be pretty tough, in terms of making bucks, so I can’t guarantee that I will give you all a genuine raree show.

Still, to start things off, a quote from Aristotle’s Politics:

“The flute, or any other instrument which requires great skill, as for example the harp, ought not to be admitted into education, but only such as will make intelligent students of music or of the other parts of education. Besides, the flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character; it is too exciting. The proper time for using it is when the performance aims not at instruction, but at the relief of the passions. And there is a further objection; the impediment which the flute presents to the use of the voice detracts from its educational value. The ancients therefore were right in forbidding the flute to youths and freemen, although they had once allowed it. For when their wealth gave them a greater inclination to leisure, and they had loftier notions of excellence, being also elated with their success, both before and after the Persian War, with more zeal than discernment they pursued every kind of knowledge, and so they introduced the flute into education. At Lacedaemon there was a choragus who led the chorus with a flute, and at Athens the instrument became so popular that most freemen could play upon it. The popularity is shown by the tablet which Thrasippus dedicated when he furnished the chorus to Ecphantides. Later experience enabled men to judge what was or was not really conducive to virtue, and they rejected both the flute and several other old-fashioned instruments, such as the Lydian harp, the many-stringed lyre, the 'heptagon,' 'triangle,' 'sambuca,' the like- which are intended only to give pleasure to the hearer, and require extraordinary skill of hand. There is a meaning also in the myth of the ancients, which tells how Athene invented the flute and then threw it away. It was not a bad idea of theirs, that the Goddess disliked the instrument because it made the face ugly; but with still more reason may we say that she rejected it because the acquirement of flute-playing contributes nothing to the mind, since to Athene we ascribe both knowledge and art.“

Notes of an editor

Lately,I've been trying to scuff up some decent labor. Times are slow, and the schedule of my bill collectors is starting to outrun my excuses. So, I decided, in desperation, to check out Craig's list - since none of the academics I usually go to knew of anyone, or had anything. Craig's list is crowded, it appears, with editors offering services and minted credentials, yet the adverts have that last chance aura of a used car dealer's smile, that awful sinking feeling one gets around zoo born predators, with the bars in their very eyes. I'm no springing Leopard of the Lord myself, but when I read of someone offering to put "snap and pop" into your next business proposal, I inwardly groan and the spirit do run low. I ruthlessly excise snap and pop whenever I see it. Lucidity, a cool intelligence, a minimum of five dollar words, and the grain of your voice when you have something fucking real to say - that's what I always hope the game is about. If it is about snap and pop, hand me the shovel, because I want to be on that end that clears away shit rather then the end that piles it up.

Such is the sad life of LI at the moment, underemployed and overcaffeinated.

Why the hen won't lay no egg

The beast it cometh, cometh down
The beast it cometh, cometh down
The beast it cometh, cometh down
... It's Tupelo bound


“I have to admit to being increasingly irritated at the tendency of British commentators and politicians to present the election as France's last-chance saloon, for in most things that combine to make up a decent quality of life, from health to literacy, to gentility and solicitude for the vulnerable, France has us beaten.

Mr Sarkozy did not appear too convinced of this when he came to London three months ago to address expatriates who had fled high unemployment in France to find work in the City's booming financial-services sector. Referring to London as possessing a 'vitality' that Paris sorely lacked, Mr Sarkozy exhorted the crowd to return home - after casting their vote for him of course. 'France is still your country, even if you are disappointed by it,' he said, at the same time promising less regulation, more jobs and other free-market reforms.

The BBC's Crossing Continents took up the theme, broadcasting a documentary on how French graduates are flocking to the Square Mile. But the BBC should follow up its investigation with a comparison of how each country treats its citizens once they move from the freedom of youth to buying a house, getting from A to B, educating the children, staying healthy and growing old. For the fact is that British migration to France, at just over 40,000 a year, outstrips French migration to Britain. Most of those who leave cite what they see as a declining British values system, the soaring cost of living and poor public services.”

Of course, the French immigrants to London story has gotten great play in the states, too, especially in the Washington Post. Annie Applebaum, whose articles double dip – once in the post, once on Slate – made a special point of it. And, as is typical of the neo-con shit that sings insanely in one’s ear, a constant drone of lies and nonsense, Applebaum, operating with a complete ignorance of the situation, managed to draw out of her ass the pack of halftruths so dear to the editors of Slate and the Fred Hiatts of top dog punditdom.

Mr. Scruggs, commenting on my last heartfelt cry for a PS victory, poured some skepticism on the mush mouthed Royal – and who can disagree that she has been mush mouthed? However, unlike Jospin, she did actually mention the name of the party she was running on – quite a leap forward. That she has to make a deal with the moderates has everything to do with the failure of the ‘extreme left’ to do anything with the victory that was theirs in voting down the constitution. And the unsightly spectacle that resulted in another dreary star led party by Bové went down in flames even before it went up, which is a new record in crashes. It shouldn’t be that hard to balance a sensible nationalism – the nation defined as that political unit that potentially allows the maximum amount of popular governance, and slice and dice that as you will later – with the defense of well being, but the ‘left’ seems not to understand its own fucking history anymore. As we have often said on this site, left and right are prisms to look at the same treadmill of production – liberal, conservative, nazi, communist, they all centrally share the assumption that there is no alternative to that treadmill. We may be on the edge of a historical moment when that assumption is shaken, but we aren’t there by a long shot yet. Sarko’s edge is given by his racism, pure and simple. Under cover of that racist edge in the U.S., Nixon actually codified and expanded the Great society. Sarko has even taken a page from Nixon in suggesting affirmative action – which, yes Virginia, arose as a conservative solution to the problem of racial justice back there in the early seventies. The racism has been a hard thing for Royal to deal with. She has done the politician’s natural thing, and sometimes tried to gain some of the shit glamour of that for herself – in the same way Clinton had his sister souljah moment. But it was really impossible for Royal to deal in those goods, especially against a man who embodies the flic with the baton mentality.

One of the useful things about the dread twentieth century is that all the programs were tried. So we know how the reactionary program will work in France. The model of disenfranchisement and the takedown of the structure of well being will be experimented with first among blacks: immigrants and the children of immigrants. Destroying the network requires segmenting it first, and if you can unravel it at the bottom it is much easier to unravel it all the way through. LI’s prediction is that this won’t happen. There will be the riots. There will be the intensified surveillance regime. There will be the nutty concessions by the socialists. But the main thing – the cycle of ‘flattening the earth’, to use the metaphor beloved by Thomas Friedman – is even now giving less of a return. The worldwide trend towards privatization has reversed itself, quietly, over the last six years. The juiciest privatizations yet to come are in the Gulf region, and it is becoming painfully obvious to Bush’s base, the investor class, that the fuck up in Iraq, while killing the unimportant up to now, is starting to screw with the money. Of course, the French economy is also targeted, and Sarkozy would love to inflict maximum Tony Blair on the place. But everything depends on how far his racist edge will get him.

ps - clementine autaine is good and succinct about what happened, here. I don't know if she is correct that 60 percent of France's employees voted Sarko, but I can believe it. The question is whether they will cut their throats in the upcoming legislative elections.

encore une fois de plus

On assiste sur les chaînes de Bouygues et de Lagardère à des tracts électoraux !» «Il nous reste deux jours, restez debout, c'est vous, le peuple français, qui allez décider. Dressez-vous contre tous les systèmes, dressez-vous pour une France juste et forte, dressez-vous pour la lumière, refusez l'esprit de revanche, refusez tous les mensonges et toutes les haines. En avant ! – Segolene Royal.

If only she’d been this tough all through. Aye. Go Royal! France is about to elect its Bush, its spirit of revenge, its gleeful little bumpkin, its smug side, its action hero flic. We know this is going to be a fucking bust. Must we watch this cycle all over again? No to thatcher, reagan, bush, aznar, and berlusconi. Don't do it, France.

Western man, don't you... come aroounnd....

“What madness says of itself is, for the thought and the poetry of the beginning of the 19th century, equally what the dream says in the disorder of its images: a truth of man, a very archaic and very near truth, very silent and very menacing: a truth under every truth, the closest to the birth of subjectivity, and the most distributed on the level of things; a truth that is the profound retreat of the individuality of man, and the inchoate from of the cosmos: What dreams, is the Spirit in the instant that it descends into matter, and it is the Matter in the instant that it lifts itself up to the Spirit. The dream is the revelation of the very essence of man, the most characteristic process, the most intimate of life.” - Foucault

There is little mention of the new world in Foucault’s book about madness. But I spy with my little eye a whole world of docking points, places where the savage connects to the madman. These figures operate in tandem, in the mysterious fields of the Western man, bronco buster and pissant – and they also operate, I’d say – taking a bold step – as sosies, parody doubles, of homo oeconomicus, that new species hatched upon the word by what Polanyi calls The Great Transformation. That transformation operated upon the European savage, be he the Galician serf watching Napoleon’s soldiers marching by or the Irish peasant crawling through the fields to find a place to dump his starving body, as it operated upon the New World savage – and sometimes, as in the ‘providential’ emptying out of Ireland and the ‘providential’ ‘vanishing’ of the Indian in the Midwest and South, with surprisingly similar results. The treadmill of production is already switched to the on position.

Memmie le blanc and the other feral children of the 18th century are curiosities of the boundary that also cuts across the treatment and definition of the mad. Which means that the discovery of the European savage, the feral child, changes its meaning and terms during the 18th century.

Jumpcutting, then, to the problem of languages that still brings up all the old circus figures, re that New Yorker article – what Duguld Stewart says about Adam Smith’s essay on the origin of language gives us a nice little peephole into the narrative that was given to Memmie’s life, and would be given to Kaspar Hauser’s – these creatures from the woods in whom conjecture was magically embodied in the village, transported to courts and ending up apprenticed to shoemakers or put in nunneries, to the great delight of the savant:

“When, in such a period of society as that in which we live,
we compare our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners,
and institutions, with those which prevail among rude tribes, it
cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what
gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple
efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so
wonderfully artificial and complicated. Whence has arisen that
systematical beauty which we admire in the structure of a
cultivated language; that analogy which runs through the mixture
of languages spoken by the most remote and unconnected nations;
and those peculiarities by which they are all distinguished from
each other? Whence the origin of the different sciences and of
the different arts; and by what chain has the mind been led from
their first rudiments to their last and most refined
improvements? Whence the astonishing fabric of the political
union; the fundamental principles which are common to all
governments; and the different forms which civilized society has
assumed in different ages of the world? On most of these subjects
very little information is to be expected from history; for long
before that stage of society when men begin to think of recording
their transactions, many of the most important steps of their
progress have been made. A few insulated facts may perhaps be
collected from the casual observations of travellers, who have
viewed the arrangements of rude nations; but nothing, it is
evident, can be obtained in this way, which approaches to a
regular and connected detail of human improvement.

In this want of direct evidence, we are under a necessity of
supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable
to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon
particular occasions, of considering in what manner they are
likely to have proceeded, from the principles of their nature,
and the circumstances of their external situation. In such
inquiries, the detached facts which travels and voyages afford
us, may frequently serve as land-marks to our speculations; and
sometimes our conclusions a priori, may tend to confirm the
credibility of facts, which, on a superficial view, appeared to
be doubtful or incredible.”

This may appear to be a remark relevant only to speculative histories and anthropology. However, what unfolded from the idea of conjectural history, as Stewart saw, was the whole theory of economics, which brought with it the notion that social action can be modeled, and that the models can be like models of other material events. The main thing about these conjectural histories is that the expert, representing us, is at one end. We are the goal.

IT'S HERE!!!!!!

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