How to be a left conservative in one easy lesson

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Now, there is a sense in which this passage can be overemphasized. In the Great Transformation, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systemeticity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself. The pessimism that I mean to hastily trace from Leopardi up to the conservative revolutionaries in Germany arose within this contentious space. Frankenstein’s creature is a casualty of this tension – the new man who comes into the world entirely without the unbought grace of life, though endowed with an irrepressible Lockean potential.

advertisement for myself

I don’t usually advertise my journalism stuff on this blog. But today I will. I started my new column on academic books in the Austin Statesman today. Check it out. The deal is that I will, as the spirit moves the editors at the paper, be doing these roundups of two university press books now and then. The column debuts with a close look at Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms (which, I must say, I deal with mighty handily – my five pages of objections to the book boiled down to a pretty succinct seven paragraph takedown) and James Simpson’s Burning to Read. In the future, I’m going to try to chose books for each column that are a little more related – although making these books rub elbows was fun.

So tell your Ma, tell your Pa, and tell the person you know who works for a university press or who wants to publish some academic book. I think this column might be a first for a regular newspaper. And if it goes well, I’ll become the godfather of the academic publishing world. Those on my right hand I will elevate to their thrones in heaven, those on my left hand I will damn eternally. Or something like that. My friend Dave has often remarked that it is a lucky thing for the world that I never gained either wealth or power, since I have a cruel and dictatorial soul – wrapped in the body of a beggar. True enough.

faustian pessimism

So far in my happiness work I’ve been digging at the roots of the happiness culture – connecting that culture with the apparent freeing up of the positional economy as the industrial and market system established itself – looking for the routes of dissemination that connected a new vocabulary and a conceptual structure with the vocabulary and conceptual structures of ordinary language and ordinary practices – etc. But I have intentionally not, up until now, looked at another vocabulary and conceptual structure which emerged after the French Revolution and flowed into twentieth century fascism. This was the reactionary attack on happiness. When, in Thomas Mann’s Observations of a Non-Political Man – the famous essay that made him seem to be one of the conservatives in the Weimar period – he attacks happiness, he is signaling a taking of sides, a polemical position, with a conventional reference. When, hearing of the murder of Luxemberg and Liebknecht, Mann, in his diary, called them stupid Berserkers and “Beglückern”(quoted in Lehnert and Vessell, 30) – he is pointing to the same complex of things that served as the object of De Maistre’s attack on democracy and the rights of man in the 1790s.

When Mann writes: “I hate politics and the belief in politics. I don’t believe in a formula for the antheap of humanity, the human beehive. I don’t believe in the democratic, social and universal republic. I don’t believe humanity is made for happiness, I don’t even believe that it wants happiness…” - there 's a certain merging of intelligence and extreme dumbness there. Dangerous currents were obviously in play. Spengler, whose Decline of the West was published soon after The Observations (and was carefully read by Mann), wrote:

"Socialism – in its highest sense, not in that of the street – is like everything Faustian an exclusive ideal, that owes its populism only to a complete misunderstanding, even under the masters of words, that is is, namely, quintessentially a thing of rights, and not duties, that it is a casting aside, rather than a sharpening, of the kantian imperative, a neglect of, rather than a tightening of the directing energy. This trivial superficial tendency to well being, “freedom”, humanity, the happiness of the greatest number contains only the negative of the faustian ethic, very much in opposition to classical Epicureanism, for which the blessed circumstance was really the center and sum of all ethics. (I 500)

We can look back and see where that line of thought, that socialism, led to. But perhaps this ‘looking back” is a bit of a delusion itself, as though we understood the inner line of fate of a culture due to the accident of being born after the historical chaser to the metaphysical cocktail – a chaser composed of concentration camps, bombs, mass graves and Autobahns. Julien Benda, in the Betrayal of the Clerks, written in 1927, and revised in 1946, understood how central the attack on happiness was to the ideology of order, and how much the ideology of order was parasitic upon the order of war:

« More generally, the scarecrow of the men of order is the modern claim of the people to happiness, the hope of the disappearacne of war being only one aspect of this. In which they [the men of order] find a strong support in the catholic church insofar as it, for theological reasons, condemns man’s hope to be happy in the world below. It is nevertheless curious to see that the church has vividly accentuated this condemnation since the coming of the democracies (against whom it throws the reproach, in particular, of forgetting original sin). On could cite in this sense catholic texts which, before this time, one would have difficulty finding the equivalents. One can’t deny, for instance, that the attitude of Joseph de Maistre, proclaiming that war is the will of god, and that in consequence the search for peace is impious, had never been taken by Bossuet or Fenelon, but that it is intimately tied to the apparition of democracy, that is to say, the claim of the people to be happy. A claim which, according to de Maistre, leads to insubordination. Napoléon said : Misery is the school of the good soldier. Certain social parties freely say that it is the school of the good citizen. »

Given this intellectual lineage, it is time for LI to confront this aspect of ‘faustian’ culture – especially after Frankenstein. So we will do some posts about pessimism in the next week or so.

people have the power...

...to redeem the work of fools.

LI, much like the New York Times, Fox News, and Vogue, has an international staff of dedicated journalists working 24/7. Our correspondent in France, Amie, recently sent a far ranging response to our post about Mailer as a philosopher/buffoon, which she has kindly agreed to let us publish.

The passage from Hippias Minor really is remarkable, the way it articulates power, knowledge, justice -- and the 'subject' (in the double sense) of 'true' discourse. Who is speaking? Socrates seems to occupy all the positions in turn in this dialogue's theater -- Homer, Achilles, Odysseus! In the end he cannot even quite believe or agree with or even quite know what he is saying himself. In Socratic terms, this would mean, at this juncture, he doesn't know himself! And ah, what of the silent narrator, Plato 'himself', seated in the wings, 'merely' observing, recording, reporting. Quite.

Another remarkable aspect of this passage from an early and 'minor' dialogue is that this matter of the character and the discourse of a polytropos pretty much relates to THE question for Plato -- that would necessitate the booting of the poets from the Republic -- regarding that pesky jobie so hard to pin down let alone resolve: mimesis.

Er, not to worry, I'm not about to launch into a 'commentary' on the Republic! I do beg your indulgence if I cannot help but relate these amazing passages to what is happening in this here Republic of France. You've likely heard of the strikes underway by the Unions and students, and can well imagine the punditry in response. The unions and students are portrayed as spoiled and self-centered, ungrateful of their privileges. "France" is told it can longer live in the 60s and 70s and must modernize, i.e., accept the generous reign of the 'free' market, the benevolent rule of the 'invisible hand'. (Thatcher and Reagan are the very models of modernity, don't ya know!)

As a pharmakon to the nauseating punditry, I've been reading Rimbaud's Saison and am struck again by the magnificent tenir le pas gagné. AR wanted to have done with canticles to Science and Magic, liars all! Alas, their hymns to the invisible hand still need to be fought, exposed, mocked. The fucking invisible hand has blood on it! The question for the 'seer' is to render it visible, legible in its violent mechanisms. One needs to have the 'eye' for it, as you say. And of course such an 'other' eye has its violence and madness...

Such hymns are not content to just praise their Holy Invisible Hand which smites public services and reduces them to rubble, which is for the public good - if only the infidels could see! The choir knows that its praise and good work is in vain if it does not also accomplish an abasement of public discourse, the effacement of social relations.

Sorry. I rant. But one last comment. I might be wrong, but I think the hymns to the invisible hand go hand in hand with what you call Happiness Triumphant. Unless I'm mistaken, the latter has ab-solute disconnect as a defining characteristic. It is like a perpetually and feverishly expanding bubble that can never be or have enough. A bubble that nothing can touch or burst, that knows nothing of the voluptuousness of a touch and of mortality, except in the form of fear and fascination, of revulsion and murder.
"Enough" is the title of a very beautiful short text by Beckett. Here is the last line:

Enough my old breasts feel his old hand.”

And for more on the strikes, and Sarkozy’s ‘strategy of the scapegoat’ – which consists of provoking the most vulnerable unions to strike in order to pick off, piecemeal, the whole system of unions, a la Thatcher – see many of the posts at the Betapolitique site.

Iraq news

Since the American press has fallen even below its previous wretched standard of reporting in Iraq - to no reporting at all - LI will now ocassionally point our readers to news Iraq articles. Here's an Asian Times article that says important things about what it happening there.

Locke's monster

One of the classic pedantic routines is to object when someone refers to Frankenstein’s monster as Frankenstein. But there is a two fold objection to this objection. One objection is it gives us no reason to make an exception for the standard procedure for naming descendants. Either by birth or adoption, Frankenstein’s children would be called Frankenstein. If Frankenstein’s monster would not be so called, we need a reason why. And that reason would surely depend on some break, some tremor of distress, some disturbance in the patriarchy itself. There is good reason for this text to have attracted so many feminist readings.

The second objection is narrower - but it does lead us into the depths. Throughout the text, Victor Frankenstein refers to his creature in many ways, and that multitude of descriptions add up to the fact that the creature doesn’t possess a canonical name.

Names have been of interest to philosophers because of their connection to description, on the one hand, and to possible worlds, on the other. Russell codified a way of regarding names as descriptions that emphasized the way a name has to operate in a system. You can define a system as, among other things, that set of processes in which there is a standard method of substitution among variables. In On Denoting, Russell wrote:

“My theory, briefly, is as follows. I take the notion of the variable as fundamental; I use `C(x)' to mean a proposition in which x is a constituent, where x, the variable, is essentially and wholly undetermined. Then we can consider the two notions `C(x) is always true' and `C(x) is sometimes true'. Then everything and nothing and something (which are the most primitive of denoting phrases) are to be interpreted as follows:
C(everything) means `C(x) is always true';
C(nothing) means ` ``C(x) is false'' is always true';
C(something) means `It is false that ``C(x) is false'' is always true.'

Here the notion `C(x) is always true' is taken as ultimate and indefinable, and the others are defined by means of it. Everything, nothing, and something are not assumed to have any meaning in isolation, but a meaning is assigned to every proposition in which they occur. This is the principle of the theory of denoting I wish to advocate: that denoting phrases never have any meaning in themselves, but that every proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning.”

Victor Frankenstein, one finds as his story unfolds, never gives his creature a proper name. Instead, the creature is subject to a repertoire of descriptive phrases. He calls him, in the space of one page: “the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life”, “that wretch”, “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived”, “the wretch whom I feared every turning of the street would present to my view” – and this is just the start of a vast aria of descriptive phrases (aria is the word that comes to mind – it is rather astonishing Frankenstein was never turned into an opera).

The proliferation of descriptive phrases, the inability of denotation, here, to coalesce around a proper name, is not just an odd structural feature of the narrative. Rather, it is about a basic trauma done to the creature, another description for whom would be Locke’s monster. Like Emile, that foundling of modernity, Frankenstein comes gradually to consciousness among a landscape of mountains and streams as his sense impressions generate equivalent ideas in his head. The wretch’s own account of inventing fire and feeling pain, distinguishing bird from bird and birdsong from birdsong in splendid titanic isolation is classic Locke. Here the wretch explains his first days of the ‘original era of his being’:

"It was dark when I awoke; I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it
were, instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted
your apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some
clothes, but these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of
night. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could
distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat
down and wept.

"Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of
pleasure. I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the
trees. [The moon] I gazed with a kind of wonder. It moved slowly,
but it enlightened my path, and I again went out in search of berries.
I was still cold when under one of the trees I found a huge cloak, with
which I covered myself, and sat down upon the ground. No distinct
ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger,
and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rang in my ears, and on
all sides various scents saluted me; the only object that I could
distinguish was the bright moon, and I fixed my eyes on that with
pleasure.

"Several changes of day and night passed, and the orb of night had
greatly lessened, when I began to distinguish my sensations from each
other. I gradually saw plainly the clear stream that supplied me with
drink and the trees that shaded me with their foliage. I was delighted
when I first discovered that a pleasant sound, which often saluted my
ears, proceeded from the throats of the little winged animals who had
often intercepted the light from my eyes. I began also to observe,
with greater accuracy, the forms that surrounded me and to perceive the
boundaries of the radiant roof of light which canopied me. Sometimes I
tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but was unable.
Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the
uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into
silence again.”

The lesson of cold, the lesson of heat. The origin of language. That wretch, the isolato. There is a convergence between the power of these isolato narratives and the breaking apart of the traditional positional economy under the stress of capitalism. The isolato, I should point out, substitutes for a previous system of imitatio. But enough! The orb of the day is passing all too quickly over myself, a freelance isolato if there ever was one.

digging the monster up again

Frankenstein certainly ranks up there among the most interpreted books of our time – it has been so tracked across by interpreters, so used for this or that thesis, that LI, whose meditations on happiness have intersected with Frankenstein lately, feels a bit like a thrift store irregular in talking about the book at all. It is a book that, more than most, projects its visionary schema upon the critic – after all, what critic of a book about creating a giant by stitching together the dead bodies of human beings doesn’t feel the eerie doubling effect of creating another Frankenstein by stitching together parts of Shelley’s biography adn passages from the book in the giant frame of one’s own favorite schema? Monster begets monster.

And of course, ever since Mary Poovey, long ago in the Derridean eighties, hung her feminist interpretation upon Mary Shelley’s words in her 1831 introduction to a new edition of the novel – Shelley called the book “my hideous progeny” – Frankenstein has served as a constant reference for a number of critical schools – for feminist analyses of science, for cultural studies, for a sort of lit crit trick Freudianism. It is no accident, either – the myth around the text seems built to invite larger ponderings. What other novel has ever resulted from a bet between a gathering of famous writers? In Byron’s case, perhaps the most famous writer of the epoch. Even the origin of the book seems hideously artificial – a work galvanized into existence, rather than organically formed in the womb of the author’s soul – to tease us all a bit with sexist metaphors.

For a feminist, Mary Shelley has to be one of the most irresistible figures in history. Here she is, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the world’s first true self conscious feminist – and here she is, the ur-Victorian, as Poovey puts it:
“Indeed, only by viewing Shelley’s public persona in the context of her private comments and actions can we fully appreciate the paradigmatic place this very unusual woman occupied in the final triumph of Victorian propriety. For in the tensions between the public Mary Shelley and the private one we can identify both some of the sacrifices a young woman had to make in order to conform to propriety and the stages by which unladylike feelings could be reformulated so as never to exceed a woman’s proper, altogether tractable, desires.”

Recall that these words were published in 1984. The Meese commission, which saw the strange alliance of certain feminist leaders and Ronald Reagan’s attorney general in a treatise that was all about tractable and intractable desires, comes out in 1986. The crossroads crowd in upon us – but LI is forgetting hisself. Crossroads are for vampires.

Still, having allotted myself the lonely and grisly task of digging through the past – or rather, imagining the undergrounds that have lead to the global disaster of the happiness culture – I am going down to the damps of the grave and have my fling with Mary Shelley’s novel in some posts to come.