and what are you doing? Oh, first let me tell you what I'm doing...

I was talking on the phone last night with a friend who is thinking of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair this November to peddle her translating talent. She lives in Barcelona and has translated two novels from Spanish, one for FSG. So we talked a little bit about plans and projects, and I admitted that I am in a trough vis a vis fiction. But, I said, I’ve been doing this thing on my blog that I’d love to, to do something with. Then I started spieling to her about how for the last year I’ve been developing these different themes that have a certain coherence: the career of the sage in the West, and the expulsion of the sage as one of the founding gestures of modernity; the construction of Happiness Triumphant, as happiness became not merely a mood or a feeling, but the keystone of all moods and feeling; the dialectical career of volupte, originally a liberating opening to pleasure, under the sign of Epicurus, rediscovered by the libertines, but soon adopted by the bourgeoisie as part of the pleasure-pain calculus legitimating capitalism; and these numerous capillary connections to two events of the longue duree, the treadmill of production (underneath capitalism and socialism) and the war culture. Such was my spiel. Well, believe it or not, I’m a spieler. It is unbelievable, sometimes, the bullshit that falls from my lips, as though the devil rode my tongue. I’ve exerted, to the right audience, a sinister and bizarre influence.

However, even to myself I could tell that these themes form something more like a cloud, a diffuse atmosphere, a certain temperature, rather than anything solid enough to climb upon. Imagine the Decline of the West as composed within the brain of an amorous cricket and you get some idea of the essay I’d like to gestate. But there it is…

My pre-occupation with these things has brought me back to certain philosophical concerns of my LI's wild years. Yet, as I look around at philosophy blogs, I don’t see a lot I feel akin to. Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, to me, were all about tracing paths. Their successors are more like Calasso, or Ginzberg, or Hadot, or Veyne, rather than those who are currently popular with the theory crowd. Who are pretty indifferent to genealogies, traces, histories, all the old fuddery. That makes LI a bit of an outlier, eh? Still, I can see this … project, in the distance – a glorious outline in a pea soup mist, getting underway as crowds wave handkerchiefs and the crew blows kisses, goodbye!

ps - I can't wholly lament my inability to get ahead with this blog. I went to a google search reference that brought someone to limited inc and I'm proud to say that we are SECOND if you are searching for Suck My Big Cock. My parents will be so proud!

our blue planet - one of the galaxy's premier outhouses!

I am reviewing the book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. The book is about the world as it would be if humans disappeared about now – perhaps prey to some human created virus, or swept up in the Rapture.

It is an impressive reminder that when the U.S. sent up that satellite in the seventies, the one with the famous drawing of a heroic human figure by Leonardo Da Vinci and various emblematic signs indicative of our human kind, we forgot the sign for endless shit. What is that sign, anyway? It should be in the zodiac. Some star cluster spelling out turd. Humans are characterized, more than anything else, by their tremendous ability to create garbage. No other creature has ever created garbage on the human scale. We each use more energy than a blue whale, and we each turn it into more waste than a blue whale weighs.

Take plastic. Since its invention, about fifty years ago, it is all still here.

“EXCEPT FOR A SMALL AMOUNT that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last fifty years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

That half century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture. A year later, less than 1 percent was gone.

“And that’s under the best controlled laboratory conditions. That’s not what you will find in real life,” says Tony Andrady. “Plastics haven’t been around long enough for microbes to develop the enzymes to handle it, so they can only biodegrade the very-low-molecular-weight part of the plastic”—meaning, the smallest, already broken polymer chains. Although truly biodegradable plastics derived from natural plant sugars have appeared, as well as biodegradable polyester made from bacteria, the chances of them replacing the petroleum-based originals aren’t great.”

I’m quoting from the Orion magazine excerpt. Reader, do read this article. Orion is one of the smartest magazines going at the present time, and their environmental reporting and essays are so much better than the gasbaggery of most magazines that it is depressing.

Weisman’s chapter is about where that plastic is mostly going. It is mostly going into that part of this beautiful planet that God looked down upon, and said – to his angels – this shall be man’s toilet bowl, where he can dump all the shit and crap he needs, after filling his guts with twinkies and potato chips. You guessed it: the oceans! yes indeed, this little hominid critter is doing a bang up job on the oceans. There is a part of the Pacific ocean in the horse latitudes between California and Hawaii known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. It is mostly avoided by ships, since the water in it is warm and slowly rotates in a vast vortex. It is the size of Texas. The plastic bag I took my groceries home in two years ago this day is probably there; as is the potato chip bag I crumpled up, the Styrofoam that my computer was packed in, and a bike tire or two. The plastic in the upper waters has been measured. It now outnumbers the plankton. Plastic is made in little pellets called nurdles, and those little pellets find their way, by wind and water, to the ocean two. It is estimated that two hundred fifty million pounds is manufactured each year. And the pellets then go through guts. Just as sea birds and turtles consume empty balloons and rubber bands, these miniscule nurdles are eaten by tinier creatures. A biologist named Richard Thompson has been studying this:

“Thompson’s team realized that slow mechanical action—waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches—were now doing the same to plastics. The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments.

“We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”
He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on poly-ethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawai’i dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of forty-four pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds.

There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-sized quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.
When the particles lodged in their intestines, the resulting constipation was terminal. But if the pieces were small enough, they passed through the invertebrates’ digestive tracts and emerged, seemingly harmlessly, out the other end. Did that mean that plastics were so stable that they weren’t toxic? At what point would they start to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms some time far in the future?

Richard Thompson didn’t know. Nobody did, because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what will happen to them. His team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them.”

Now, some would call this a shame and maybe even get all environmentally sappy. But luckily, in the country that counts, the U.S. of A., we have a hard core of people who have it on the authority of Jehovah himself that we can fuck with the planet any old way we want to. It is called the gang bang theory of human domination – oh, I’m sorry, that’s wrong. It is called Christianity. Not all Christianity, let’s not be unfair. The Catholic church, for instance, is so concerned about the plastic that goes into making condoms that they are doing the Lord’s work in trying to get condoms out of, like, Africa. I’m thinking more of the punkass peckerwood right. And they have an organization! Is that cool or what? it is called the interfaith punkass peckerwood movement. Just joking! It is called the Interfaith council for Environmental Stewardship. By Environmental Stewardship the IES means the same thing RJ Reynolds means by Public health – don’t believe the hype! cigarettes are good for you, Al Gore made up that thing about global warming, and God doesn’t want you to do anything romantic – pagan even – and against free enterprise (his other commandment) by making the ocean into something other than what God wanted it to be: a vast toilet.

And to think: some say this isn’t the greatest country in the world.

Intrepid pedicons unite!

“Who does not know', Forberg exclaimed at one point, 'that the Greeks and Romans were intrepid pedicons and determined cinaedes?” – Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920”, Art History 2001.

Who indeed? Davis’ interesting article outlines the gay millionaire boho culture of the late nineteenth century and the early 20th, which was centered at Capri in particular, where Jacques d'Adelswaerd Fersen, the son of a Swedish, I believe, millionaire established a famous pleasure palace and enlivened its grounds with faux classical sculptures of his boyfriends, dancing and generally rippling muscularity for all to see. This was the world of Gide, Symonds, Wilde, and Norman Douglas. This culture looked back on a surreptitious tradition going back to LI’s man, d’Hancarville:

“The classical philologist Paul Brandt (1875-1929) was the 'Hans Licht' of a widely read three-volume social history of Greece, emphasizing her sexual practices and erotic art. In its depth and range the book and art collection of Brandt and his partner Werner von Bleichroeder was probably the most important of the period.[ 6] It included refined contemporary homoeroticist visual fantasy and pornography -- some of it by top semi-clandestine artists, like Otto Schoff, connected with Jugendstil and Art Nouveau -- intercut with stylistically more classicizing or mock-classical materials. The latter included the prints for a 1907 luxury edition of the frank and learned commentary (an Apophoreta, or 'second course') by Friedrich Karl Forberg (1770-1848), first published in 1824, on the Hermaphroditus of Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471) of about 1460, which was itself a collation of Latin erotic epigrams and quotations culled from ancient Roman sources (such as Martial) and edited by Beccadelli. For nineteenth-century readers, Forberg's Apophoreta was perhaps the single most detailed source for unorthodox sexual practices, and certainly for the sexual vocabularies, of the ancients.[ 7] Forberg corrected the text of a sixteenth-century manuscript of Beccadelli published in Paris in 1791. Most such copies had been suppressed in the Renaissance; as Symonds observed, the 'open animalism' of the text did not sit well with moralists.[ 8] Several attempts were made to suppress Forberg's edition. But it was assiduously preserved in nineteenth-century erotic book and art collections and rescued by publishers of erotica. Isidore Liseux issued a poor French translation of the Apophoreta in 1882. And at the end of the century Charles Carrington published a good English translation, accompanied by further notes; in a nod to the now-notorious circles of Symonds, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, it was supposedly produced by 'Viscount Julian Smithson, M.A.' for his friends.[ 9]

Some copies of Forberg's edition of 1824 had been illustrated with a number of engravings taken over from P.F. Hugues d'Hancarville's pornographic publications of mock-ancient gems, produced in the 1770s and 1780s, to be considered in more detail below.[ 10] These were reproduced yet again in a special album of prints published to accompany a 1907 French translation of the entire edition of 1824 --Hermaphroditus and Apophoreta.[ 11] Throughout his Apophoreta Forberg continuously cited d'Hancarville's engravings as pictorial illustrations of the sexual possibilities mentioned in Beccadelli's or the collated Roman texts -- the postures of pedicatio (anal intercourse), irrumatio (oral intercourse) and so on, whether heterosexual or male and female homosexual.[ 12] Brandt and Bleichroeder owned a luxury new edition of the English translation; published by Charles Hirsch in Paris and dated 1907, it contained twenty new obscene plates, three of them explicitly homosexual.[ 13] That Beccadelli-Forberg highlighted homosexual practices is clear from the text -- 'who does not know', Forberg exclaimed at one point, 'that the Greeks and Romans were intrepid pedicons and determined cinaedes?'[ 14] -- and had been noted by Symonds. Brandt knew the work well; for his own use he prepared an index to the first German translation (printed after his death), which had been produced in Leipzig in 1908 by the homosexualist publisher Max Spohr accompanied by a new, modernized sexological commentary on Forberg's original Apophoreta by Alfred Kind.”

The Hermaphroditus has a special place in LI’s heart – long ago, in the 80s, we wrote a forty page essay about it as an example of my work for the U.T. philosophy department. Those forty pages have long ago departed this world, but we vaguely remember that this paper was about the enlightenment system of the senses, with its emphasis on touch and its problem with that emphasis when it came to admiring the luscious buttocks of the Hermphroditus, a sculpture that was particularly appreciated by Winckelmann (DC) and Herder (AC). The problem of arousal and the problem of the sense that art appeals to – that sweaty palmed urge of these German travelers to the museums of Italy – found an echo in the emphasis on distance and disinterestedness in Kant. All of which is so much gone pedantry. Still, the notion that the world is made up of atoms of feeling has had a long and honorable career in many cultures, and still has an underground career in erotica – the sexualized universe turns the hierarchy of the senses upside down, with dumb touch being crowned phallic king.

…

While the history of art, dirty art with an emphasis on big dicks, might seem like an aleatory tradition at best, it is LI’s belief that the enlightenment interest in the cult of the phallus was connected with many of those things that made up the radical enlightenment. The Dilettanti club that sponsored Richard “Phallus” Payne also sponsored Sir William Jones, whose favorable opinion of the Persians and the Arabs and the Hindoos would be treated to immense scorn by John Stuart Mill’s father, James, in his influential History of India – a document that marks one of the turning points in the Imperial mindset. While the idea that non-European people were savages, being visibly unchristian, had long been part of the stock of European prejudices, the idea that Europe was far ahead of them, - an idea that took root, at first, in the notion of the European superiority in culture, and quickly became mixed with the idea of some superiority in stock, or race – was not part of the orthodoxy of the Enlightenment, but was, nevertheless, created within the Enlightenment. There’s an unfortunate notion that the issue about which the Enlightenment struggled was universalism. It is true that universal claims were made in the Declaration of Independence, by Kant, and by other paragons of Enlightenment thought – and of course Tom Paine was unable to get any mention of the equality of Africans in the Declaration. But LI would maintain that it was still around the issue of religion that various and opposing themes about race, sex, and progress were shaped, with a sort of second wave of relativism hitting the enlightenment intelligentsia. The first wave, of course, had hit with the discovery of the New World. The second wave hit with the discovery of the connection between non-Europe and the European past. And it played a nicely dialectical role – it both confirmed a European myth – that Europe’s past was the savage present, and that Europe was, consequently, more mature, more grown than the non-European world – and it put into question the foundation of European legitimacy, the classical heritage.

So there is a lot that comes together in the galantes archaeology and anthropology of the late eighteenth century. As we shall see in another post.

in the era of the crab louse

At one point in the 90s, I was working in a closet in a building on the Yale campus that looked, for all the world, like a pile of giant dog turds ascending fourteen stories. A Philip Johnson special. I have always despised Philip Johnson’s work, and sitting in that awful structure confirmed my view of the man. Anyway, I was working for a construction company that was doing interior reconstruction work on some of the laboratories. I was depressed, because it is hard to sit in a closet all day. Plus, it used to contain chemicals, this closet, so there were taped messages everywhere proclaiming sterile area. This struck me as a downer to my natural optimism. Besides, I wasn’t used to the North’s winters, which, to my horror, swoop down upon you and enclose you in a cloak of gloom starting in October and muffle you fucking up until March. To cheer myself up, I played my little tapes on a boom box. One in particular would drive my boss crazy. He was rarely in, but when he was in, he would nest in the outer office. It was my Lords of Acid tape. Somewhere around then Lords of Acid did a sex tour with My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and were arrested in Hartford or something. Anyway, exciting times, except for me in the closet. I thought they were sufficient unto the day thereof.

I hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Today, I went on a nostalgic little trip on YouTube, looking at a buncha Lords of Acid vids of yore. And it struck me that the lyrics to Crablouse almost exactly describe my feeling about how the body politic has been penetrated by war criminals of the Bush-Cheney-HillaryClinton type. For those who haven’t heard this rousing anthem, here’s the chorus and the second verse:

“It's there to stay, it sucks all day
It's there to bite, my parasite

The little vampire, horny and so greedy
It doesn't care about a penis and it's envy
It's intelligent, nasty and it's sick
A party animal, a pervert and a pig
If a crablouse gets mixed in your saliva
Stumbles through your body right into your vulva
Then waits patiently until a penetration
Gets it out of there and right into salvation.”

That pretty much summarizes the last six years, don’t you think? Since the coup, that thing has sucked all day, and it has sucked the political life out of many, while with others it has contented itself with their blood and ouns. Every day, another mass murder in Iraq hosted and enjoyed by the American taxpayer, another innocent frying in some Southern death and jim crow juke joint, another fake terrorist scare. This is the era of the Crab Louse. The hatchlings of its eggs inside us will be here for as long as I’m alive.

not the phallus again!

In a couple of earlier posts, LI was pursuing the track of Epicurus – not the real Epicurus but his double, his eidolon, who appeared in Europe in the 17th century in Gassendi’s work and soon became a background daemon in the libertine and materialist tradition. LI’s idea is that the intellectual history of happiness in the Early modern period has been traced too grossly, with too little attention paid to nuances having to do with, for instance, the career of volupte as a go between concept that mediated the pleasures of the flesh and the science of the flesh.

Well, we merely danced this maze lightly, and we broke off abruptly with La Mettrie’s anti-stoicism (and his paen to the orgasm). But we never actually give up a theme around here. Although it might seem to be farted around, ha! ha! unbeknownst to the innocent reader, we are making progress.

As we said in our post on IT’s various posts on porno, theorizing pornography has often led to ignoring the history of pornography. That history is connected with a lot of the broader features of modernity. Thus, for instance, the link, the indissoluble link, between porno, paganism and classical learning in Britain.

About which we will be make a couple of posts, starting with the Dilettanti club, an eighteenth century London institution that promoted archaeology. It had many famous members. Joshua Reynolds painted their portraits. Horace Walpole waspishly said that the Dilettanti club was formed with the “nominal qualification [of] having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk.” The eighteenth century was one of the drunkest of all centuries, at least for the British. In fact, one could well wonder whether English culture ever flourishes in dry times.

The Dilettanti were connected to a whole libertine whig culture, which is suggested by names like the Hellfire club. As we pointed out in our earlier posts, the Epicurean tradition via Gassendi certainly flowed into the libertine moment in France, and was multitudinously imported into England by way of exiles and Hobbesians and deists. Of course, one imagines that all of these people were aristocrats – yet that is not totally accurate. The spread of this culture among radicals who were connected to the artisan/mechanical class, the budding Priestleys and Paines, gave British radicalism its divided heritage: on the one side, the goody goody temperance and vegetarian types, and on the other, the experimenters in new sexual and cultural relations, who by degrees become the seedy barflies and soakers who flit through the diaries of all the famous twentieth century writers – the Café Royal types.

The Dilettanti published Richard Payne Knight’s book, A discourse on the worship of the priapus and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients. Then the book was suppressed by Knight, who couldn’t abide the scandal. Knight is an interesting figure, another devotee of Lucretius, and I want to get back to him, but I want to first take up the supposed Baron Pierre d’Hancarville, who set up an artist’s workshop to copy the collection of antiquities collected by a British grandee, William Hamilton, in Naples. It was Hancarville’s idea that material culture – images on pots, graffiti, and all the detritus of the antique world – could lead us into what that world was about. This was an incredibly influential idea. It wasn’t solely Hancarville’s. Yet he might have influenced Winckelmann, and through Winckelmann we can island hop up through the art historical tradition. d’Hancarville’s business – the sales of little ancient phallic charms to connoisseurs – also had an under the table effect. Freud had a collection of those phallic charms himself, and some of them might be traced back to d’Hancarville.

More on this when I have time.

another fine and supreme moment

A long time ago LI made a mistake. We had this brain flash: since the monks of old slept in their coffins, why not trade in our old bed, which trailed more bad luck than Jacob Marley trailed chains, for a small little like couch bed? We miscalculated. It turns out that LI is not a jelly fish. We have a distinct spine. Plus, we have about six feet of body, and the bed only had about 5’11” feet of space. This was hard on the foots.

Well, so it went. Live and learn. Learn, for instance, the most intimate secrets of your vertrebrae.

Well, a couple of weeks ago a woman we know decided that she was returning back to sunny California, and gave us her bed. We only had to pick it up today. Of course, the day turned out to be rainy, U-haul decided to play us in that way they have of promising a truck and not delivering, and the bed turned out to be humongous. But who the fuck cares? We finally assembled it in our little apartment, put on the new sheets, and lay down on something that offered… resistance! Incredible as that might seem. Yes, it is big enough to fuck an elephant on. And I’m talking with all the foreplay. But it comes with no bad luck, and a certain air of nobility. O, to work, again, on a bed, writing away! Perhaps this will light a fire under all our dead fictions and LI will dwindle into mere rumbles of impotent thunder about the scoundrel era of American history.

I wonder what the first dream will be like? I find that, at important turning points in my life, all my friends come and visit me in my dreams. Like they want to say hi. Even the ones who now loathe me. Plus old lovers and my Mom, dead these thirteen years. However, possibly the spirits will not find me getting a normal bed an important turning point in my life. Well, fuck the spirits! The last time I had a good bed, a really sweet bed, was 1998. I remember that bed with longing to this day.

meditation on Infinite Thought's modernist porn

IT continues her interesting series on porno today. I’m not sure where she is going with this. She has consistently interrogated the money shot as the truth of cinematic porn, finding it even back in the days of vintage porn (filmed). One aspect that she has not explored, however, is one that seems obvious to me from a narrative level. To film a man and a woman or a man and several women or several men and a woman or several of either sex fucking is to have a narrative problem. How do you keep this interesting. Now, there is an interest we all feel in fucking (wasn’t it Jane Austin who said that it is a truth universally acknowledged that we all like to watch some dick and pussy action on whatever screen is handiest, given favoring circumstances?), but the interest in art divides neatly into two registers. There is the interest of the artist in the art, and the interest of the spectator or audience. And while it is hard to imagine an artist working without any sense of what interests an audience – what conventions, what tropes, what narrative arcs - the artist has to also look to the limitations and possibilities of his materials. Thus, for instance, mystery writers can mix up their mystery, they can vary the crime involved, they can make the narrator the ultimate perpetrator, they can be as careless of clues as, say, Raymond Chandler is, but one of the things one knows about mysteries is that they generally tend to murder and some solution because those have become convenient templates for the writer.

In cinematic porno, the question is: is the money shot that has become the solution to the fucking sequence a template that makes it easier to organize the film, or are we talking about a convention that the audience imposes on the film? How could we tell? My own instinct would be that the money shot, like the murder in a mystery, solves several interest problems with the least cost to the creator. So, in essence, I'm saying the presence of the money shot derives from the direction of the creator, not the audience. I'd say that, on the audience side, we have evidence that there is less interest in the money shot. That evidence has to do with the state of porno itself, a medium in which fast forward has become the constitutive principle that has, essentially, destroyed the old movie pornos – a technological effect that is even more dramatic than the effect of the sound track on film in the late twenties. What has been left gives the creator an orientation problem. To a certain extent, you could play your average vid porno backwards and it wouldn’t make any dramatic difference. While the rite of cock sucking and pussy licking, etc., is as predictable as the liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church, it exists to cover all the bases and to extend the time. Fucking, in other words, which used to be the endpoint of a fantasy, has now dispensed with the fantasy to the greatest extent possible. This means that, in a sense, pornos have accidentally converged on the minimalist mindset of one subgroup in modernism – which at various times threw off Victorian rhetoric, dispensed with figuration in painting, and dispensed with enduring materials in conceptual art. Although there are those who are sexually attached to the money shot, to my mind, the money shot is already archaic in the fast forward universe. It is a last desperate stab at giving fucking an orientation and drama. If it were simply cut out, would it be missed by the audience? I don’t know if anybody has made the experiment. I do think that it would be missed by the filmmaker and the players. Removing cum removes a dramatic anchor. Would that removal also destroy the premium experience of porn – the audience’s own money shot, the spurting end of viewer response?

My sense that the audience could get along without it has to do with the history of still image pornography. Which actually brings me back to the question of volupté and the epicurean tradition and the pictures of Pompeii. About which I will have more to say in another post.

PS - check out Alan's post on happiness, in reply to my attack on happiness triumphant, at his blog, Milinda's Questions.