The murderer and the punctum

The true fan of real crime books must be subject to moments of panic – or so say I, a fan of real crime books subject to moments of panic. Those are irrational, lock the door moments. I am still haunted by a very little moment in Serpentine, Thomas Thompson’s book about Charles Sobhraj, the killer who preyed on tourists on the “hippie road” in Asia during the 70s. The moment occurred, if I remember correctly, when Sobhraj and his pathetic lover were living in Pattaya, a resort town in Thailand. Upstairs from them was a Dutch couple, who’d come down with a mysterious sickness (Sobhraj would befriend people, give them poisoned food or drink, then nurse them through their long sickness until he had seized all of their money, then dispose of them). The lover went up to visit them one day and found them bound and gagged, seated on some chairs. And she decided not to see this, so she simply shut the door. (At the time, she was pretending that her lover’s wealth and the disappearance of various people about them had no connection). Sobhraj by this time apparently had enough of them, and was pondering their murder and disposal, so he'd tied them down so that they couldn't get away. He shortly afterwards killed and burned them – his usual trick. But something about the door opening, the moment of hope that must have flared up their two hearts, and the door closing – well, it strikes me as distinctly panic-making, a moment of such cruelly disappointed rescue that it must have been shattering.

It is tiny scenes like these which, for some reason, are the attraction of real crime books. There is a certain fun in moral vertigo, and it can’t be reasoned out of us.

My favorite of all real crime books – the one that strikes me as the best of the genre – is not In Cold Blood. It is The Reckoning, Charles Nicholl’s expert reconstruction of the murder of Christopher Marlowe. It doesn’t have any lock the door moments – alas, it is difficult even for the high strung to fear Elizabethan assassins in this day and age – but, in compensation, it offers an incredibly intricate puzzle, as Nicholl teases out the workings of Queen Elizabeth’s secret police. Usually I’d rather have the thrill than the detective work – many real crime books, following In Cold Blood, make no bones about who the killer is, and the beauty of the book is in following him or, more rarely, her – but Nicholl combines rare traits for a writer – he is both a kind of scholar of the Renaissance (he’s also written about Raleigh and Thomas Nashe, and has a nice essay on the Cenci) and a hippie travel writer – he was in Thailand for the drugs and such during Sobhraj’s spree years (not that he ‘s ever written about Sobhraj), which gave him the material for Borderlines – the book about the Golden Triangle when it was still golden, when you could still meet people who’d done the opium thing in Thailand right, back in the late 70s - and he traveled in Columbia right before coke became the boring industry it is now, which gave him the material for an even better book, Fruit Palace.

This is by way of urging LI’s readers to check out the review of the latest attempt to finger Jack the Ripper in the LRB.

LI has had occasion to review a Jack the Ripper book – the notoriously stupid book produced by Patricia Cornwell. We reviewed it for the Chicago Sun Times. Contrary to popular belief, book reviewers don’t eagerly look forward to penning negative reviews. Perhaps in the beginning of the sad reviewing career, one salivates to bite the inflated reputation. And, it is true, you get a lot more publicity for snark than for intelligent sympathy. Yet intelligent sympathy is the only real test for the reviewer – I like to think that many of my reviews could not even be labeled positive or negative, as if the only response to a book is to pull out the gradebook. Fuck that.

However, some books call out to the gods above to punish them. And no book called out for thunderbolts more than Cornwall’s galimatias of unsound psychology and unhinged amateur police work. To quote myself:

In 1976, a journalist named Stephen Knight wrote a book claiming that the Jack the Ripper murders, a series of brutal slayings in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888, were the work of a gang set up to protect the reputation of Queen Victorian’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence. The Duke of Clarence, it seems, had contracted marriage with a lowborn Catholic, and the prostitutes who were slain in 1888 were, in one way or another, involved in a vast plan to blackmail the royal family. Knight claimed that the artist, Walter Sickert, later famous as the greatest British impressionist, was the head of the gang that had exterminated Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Kelly. Knight’s source for the rumors about Sickert was a man named Joseph Sickert, who claimed to be Walter Sickert’s illegitimate son.

Patricia Cornwall, the creator of fictional forensic detective Kay Scarpetta is also certain -- 100% certain, as she has said in numerous interviews -- that Walter Sickert is responsible for the Whitechapel murders. But you will not read a word about Knight or Joseph Sickert in this book, for Cornwall’s thesis depends, crucially, on her idea that Sickert’s organ of generation was deformed and dysfunctional. In Cornwall’s view, Sickert could not complete sexual congress normally. It is typical of the weirdness of this book that the ferver of Cornwall’s obsession with Sickert’s endownment is matched, in recent history, only by that of the Paula Jones law team’s with President Clinton’s. In the usual real crime book, Cornwall would argue for her hypothesis – which, as she admits, depends on a structure of speculation about some mysterious operations Sickert underwent as a child – by explaining away countering evidence, such as Joseph Sickert claims. There has been enough doubt expressed about Joseph Sickert that this shouldn’t be hard to manage.

But this isn’t your usual real crime book. This is an obsession in search of a justification. In Cornwall’s view, those who doubt Sickert as the murderer are, prima facie, to be doubted themselves. They are either carpers envious of Cornwall’s worldly success, or stooges of the sinister Sickert Trust. When Cornwall’s considerable investment of ego, as well as the six million dollars she spent on her investigation, meets a piece of evidence it doesn’t like, the evidence has as much chance as a Dixie cup has against a battle cruiser. You aren’t going to find it in this book. You aren’t going to find witnesses mentioned in other books, if they clutter Cornwall’s story line. You aren’t going to find suspects mentioned in other books. For Cornwall’s fans, this will surely work. They will end up convinced that Cornwall, like her fictional character, has tracked down her man through observation and the most modern tools of criminology. But for those who are interested in the Jack the Ripper case – Ripperologists, at they call themselves - these omissions have an opposite and highly depressing effect.”

Nicholl’s review is of a new suspect on the scene. Unfortunately, simply going by Nicholl’s representation of the case for Joseph Silver made by Charles van Onselen in The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath – the amateur detectives still have not gotten their man. However, van Onselen’s chase after Silver, whose cv is rich and strange (‘arsonist, bank robber, barber, bigamist, brothel-owner, burglar, confidence trickster, detective’s agent, gangster, horse-trader, hotelier, informer, jewel thief, merchant, pickpocket, pimp, policeman, rapist, restaurateur, safe-cracker, smuggler, sodomist, special agent, spy, storekeeper, trader, thief, widower, wigmaker and white slave trafficker’) makes this exercise in Ripperology at least interesting.

The Jack the Ripper murders are inherently panic-making. This is how Nicholl starts his review:

“They found Mary Jane Kelly lying on her bed, in the dingy room she rented in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street in Spitalfields. She was about 25 years old, a colleen from County Limerick, ‘possessed of considerable attractions’. Widowed young, she had turned, like thousands of others in late Victorian London, to prostitution. One of her clients had taken her for a spree to Paris, and she had started to call herself Marie Jeanette. She was also nicknamed Ginger. She lay with her head ‘turned on the left cheek’. One arm was across her stomach, the other turned outwards ‘& rested on the mattress’. She was naked and ‘the legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk’. These are the words of the police doctor summoned to the scene, Thomas Bond. It was the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888, and Kelly had just become – at a conservative estimate – the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.

The positioning of the victim’s body is consistent with the other murders, the splayed legs an immediately readable pornographic cliché: the prostitute in a pose of erotic availability. It is one of the Ripper’s ‘signatures’. It introduces a theme of retribution: this was her crime, and this is her punishment. Dr Bond does not venture these opinions, of course. His job was to observe, and to record as succinctly and scientifically as possible what he saw. His report continues: ‘The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds, & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features.’ The eviscerated body parts were scattered – or worse, arranged – about her body, ‘viz. the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side’, and so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ‘harvesting’ of body parts.”

Which puts one in mind of the ancestor of all real crime writing, De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. Perhaps I shouldn't so casually award Nicholls best in this category - but DeQuincey's is an essay, not a book. Ah, a connection is dimly appearing here, between opium and true crime writing – but this is a mere coincidence, a ladder in the stocking of the genre, so to speak. Still, perhaps one needs to understand vertigo as intimately as an opium eater like De Quincey to write a really great real crime piece. His account of the Ratcliffe Highway murders (IT, who has been doing a desultory psychogeography of London places that aren't usually seen (in the spirit of Rachel Whiteread's plaster casts of the insides of objects) lately, should perhaps plan a visit to some of the great murder scenes one of these days – these are, in their way, monuments to modernism too! - although I have no idea if you could even walk around 29 Ratcliffe Highway, now The Highway, Stepney, near King David Lane, viewable by Google Satellite pic here) is still hair raising. John Williams, a sailer, exterminated the inhabitants of two houses – one of them being the Marrs. Timothy Marr was a shopkeeper. He had a “pretty and amiable” wife; he had an eight month old baby; he had a shop boy; and he had a female servant. At around midnight on December 7th, 1811, he called downstairs to the servant to go out and purchase some oysters for the family supper. (I love details like this – what Barthes called the punctum, the unnecessarily specific – for it is in such whirls of details that we explorers in the grotesque get close, oh so close, to the very madly beating heart, the very touch of vertigo, out of which the still voice of capital crime is heard). Lucky woman departs on her errand; unlucky household, no. 29, Ratcliff Highway, is then visited by Mr. Williams. Who, as De Quincey writes, worked as Titian reportedly painted, with his best clothes on.

“Into this perilous region it was that, on a Saturday night in December,
Mr. Williams, whom we suppose to have long since made his coup d'essai,
forced his way through the crowded streets, bound on business. To say, was
to do. And this night he had said to himself secretly, that he would
execute a design which he had already sketched, and which, when finished,
was destined on the following day to strike consternation into 'all that
mighty heart' of London, from centre to circumference. It was afterwards
remembered that he had quitted his lodgings on this dark errand about
eleven o'clock P. M.; not that he meant to begin so soon: but he needed to
reconnoitre. He carried his tools closely buttoned up under his loose
roomy coat. It was in harmony with the general subtlety of his character,
and his polished hatred of brutality, that by universal agreement his
manners were distinguished for exquisite suavity: the tiger's heart was
masked by the most insinuating and snaky refinement. All his acquaintances
afterwards described his dissimulation as so ready and so perfect, that
if, in making his way through the streets, always so crowded on a Saturday
night in neighborhoods so poor, he had accidentally jostled any person, he
would (as they were all satisfied) have stopped to offer the most
gentlemanly apologies: with his devilish heart brooding over the most
hellish of purposes, he would yet have paused to express a benign hope
that the huge mallet, buttoned up under his elegant surtout, with a view
to the little business that awaited him about ninety minutes further on,
had not inflicted any pain on the stranger with whom he had come into
collision. Titian, I believe, but certainly Rubens, and perhaps Vandyke,
made it a rule never to practise his art but in full dress--point ruffles,
bag wig, and diamond-hilted sword; and Mr. Williams, there is reason to
believe, when he went out for a grand compound massacre (in another sense,
one might have applied to it the Oxford phrase of _going out as Grand
Compounder_), always assumed black silk stockings and pumps; nor would he
on any account have degraded his position as an artist by wearing a
morning gown. In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed
and recorded by the one sole trembling man, who under killing agonies of
fear was compelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become
the solitary spectator of his atrocities, that Mr. Williams wore a long
blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk. Amongst
the anecdotes which circulated about him, it was also said at the time,
that Mr. Williams employed the first of dentists, and also the first of
chiropodists. On no account would he patronize any second-rate skill. And
beyond a doubt, in that perilous little branch of business which was
practised by himself, he might be regarded as the most aristocratic and
fastidious of artists.”

In the event, the night watchman had seen Williams acting suspicious, went in and told Marr, helped him draw down the shutters for the night, and left. After which Willams pounced – the shutters being down meant that he could do his work without being seen from the outside, and the next thing to do was to gain the door before it was locked.
To think was to do:

“… one turn of the key, and the murderer would have been locked out. In,
therefore, he bolted, and by a dexterous movement of his left hand, no doubt, turned the key, without letting Marr perceive this fatal stratagem.
It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps
of this monster, and to notice the absolute certainty with which the
silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and
movements of the bloody drama, not less surely and fully than if we had
been ourselves hidden in Marr's shop, or had looked down from the heavens
of mercy upon this hell-kite, that knew not what mercy meant.”

In this brief passage, De Quincey spills the beans – this is exactly the format and the feeling of real crime stories. We participate as victims without being bloodied, and as gods insofar as not a sparrow falls – or not a fingerprint is left – without us knowing it – the lie at the very center of the genre. We are neither gods nor victims, but some huddled, obsessed thing between, and our interest in these hell-kites, these predators, is not composed entirely of repulsion.

To read about these crimes is one thing – but remember Mary Kelly. Nicholls skips the discovery of her body, but true ripperologists know the story. Discovered the morning of November 9, 1888 at 13 Miller’s Court, by a man named Bowyer who was there to collect rent for a man named McCarthy - tried her door, found it locked - peeped in the curtains and saw her mutilated body – raced to McCarthy, who contacted the police – and then accompanied two inspectors, Beck and Walter Dew, into the small crib that had served as Kelly’s abbatoir. Dew, apparently, was haunted by the scene – McCarthy told newspapers he couldn’t get it out of his mind. The onlookers, the discoverers, the one’s who narrowly escape – those are the ones who slip in and out of real crime books. They interest LI almost as much as the murderers and victims. I have always been fascinated by the accident of being spared.

Activision is Your Vision

People sleeping in the streets
I hear they want to be there
From nearly everyone I meet
at restaurants and parties
cos happiness is relative
that would be my theory
perched up here above the world
so desperate and so greedy

“Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the high-octane antiterrorism thriller developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, took top honors on Thursday night at the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the video game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars.”

LI is thrilled for Activision. There are those who say that America has forgotten it is occupying Iraq. Our gamer warriors, though, are semper fi – not our brave, not our proud.

Bobby Kotick is the CEO of Activision. You can’t fault him for ingratitude. He knows the cultcha that fed him...

“In addition, a handful of Bush Pioneers and Rangers who now give heavily to Republicans have a history of giving almost exclusively to Democrats in past elections. Activision CEO Robert Kotick gave $25,500 to Democratic candidates, leadership PACs and party committees and nothing to Republicans in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles. But in the first nine months of 2003, Kotick gave the Republican National Committee $25,000, the maximum amount allowed under the law.”

LI’s idea is that the video game industry just hasn’t gone far enough. Imagine if the box came with bandages, cotton wadding, and some dull bladed knives – so you could quickly get rid of limbs or eyes chewed up by the fragments of flying glass and metal that result from car bombs, or perhaps the cleaner, surgical bombs let loose by American aircraft! Excitement would build as one tried to play with one eye plastered over, or one leg crooked into a painful brace. Awesomeness wouldn’t be the word for it!

Call of Duty 4, released in November for PCs, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is the first game in this acclaimed series that is not set during World War II. Thought to be risky at first, the game’s modern setting and story line involving deranged ultranationalist Russians, loose nuclear bombs and a Middle Eastern coup have made it a commercial and critical success. Activision has said the game has sold more than seven million copies across its various systems.

Meanwhile, the Dems have a scary opportunity in this year of sinking real estate values. Apparently, many Americans have come to the conclusion that the sticker price for the vanity war has gone too high – imagine that!

“WASHINGTON (AP) — The heck with Congress' big stimulus bill. The way to get the country out of recession — and most people think we're in one — is to get the country out of Iraq, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Pulling out of the war ranked first among proposed remedies in the survey, followed by spending more on domestic programs, cutting taxes and, at the bottom end, giving rebates to poor people in hopes they'll spend the economy into recovery.

The $168 billion economic rescue package Congress rushed to approval this week includes rebates of $600 to $1,200 for most taxpayers, the hope being that they will spend the money and help revive ailing businesses. President Bush is expected to sign the measure next week. Poor wage-earners, as well as seniors and veterans who live almost entirely off Social Security and disability benefits, would get $300 checks.
However, just 19 percent of the people surveyed said they planned to go out and spend the money; 45 percent said they'd use it to pay bills. And nearly half said what the government really should do is get out of Iraq.

Forty-eight percent said a pullout would help fix the country's economic problems "a great deal," and an additional 20 percent said it would help at least somewhat. Some 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal; 36 percent said cutting taxes.”

There's only one problem with this - it would actually work. And that would bring down upon the Dems the collective wrath of the Petro-Gun club in D.C. Imagine, if you will, a sort of nightmare in which Pinocchio sees all the candy canes at the fair melting before his eyes - that same sinking feeling would inhabit the poor generic Dem Politicians soul as the opportunity for legal graft from the people who have the serious money in the country evaporates. It is one thing to ineffectually oppose Bush’s war plans – throwing sops to suckers is just good business. But to follow the money – why, that’s getting personal.

LI however, is ever the optimist. Maybe somebody will pick up on those poll numbers and actually use them. In the meantime, I'm getting back to picking off that crazy Russian, givin a neutron bomb to the mad mullahs - I think I'm gonna use the saturation bombing option.

the social animal/ the animal society

“There was a time when all the body’s members/
rebelled against the belly;”

Thus begins Menenius Agrippa’s speech, in the first act of Coriolanus, Wyndham Lewis’ favorite among Shakespeare’s plays. Agrippa’s speech in praise of the belly is directed at the plebes, who are clamoring for bread, and threatening the aristocracy. Usually the aristocracy is thought of as the noble head – not the glutton’s paradise of the belly. But in Shakespeare’s time, it was the belly, distributing the wealth, rather than the head, commanding the commons, which was the tendency of the time. This gives the speech that odd twist in a play in which Coriolanus will flame out as a head, a severed, noble soldier, even though, ideologically, Coriolanus’ entire being is caught up in the most extreme version of the aristocratic ideal. Menenius Agrippa’s speech is a variant on the old notion of the chain of being – the notion that informs another speech directed at rebellion, this one given in Troilus and Cressida by Ulysses, where the point is directed against an aristocrat in revolt, much as Coriolanus was in revolt – that is, it was directed against Achilles. But in the degraded world of Troilus and Cressida, Achilles does not have the nobility that is inscribed in Coriolanus’ nature.

Thinking about the ‘extension of man’ embodied in the tool and the machine – the thesis that Hacking picks up from Canguilhem, as I was at pains to show in the last posts – connects with some notions I’ve been playing with in my research on happiness. Lately I’ve been following a radical critique of capitalism, founded ultimately on forms of alienation that recur in all spheres of capitalist social life. At the same time, the nineteenth century saw another critique of capitalism that emanated from its ideological defenders, the liberals. Where the radicals turned to alienation as the shadow that continually pursues the promise of happiness, the liberal critics turned to life. In the twentieth century, there were three phrases that became current that represented the outcome of this turn: Weber’s ‘life style’ – Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ – and Scheler’s ‘life order’.

What I think I’m going to do is write a string of posts about the notion of the social animal, or the animal society, which is, I think, the locus within which the social, for liberal thinkers, dissolved into the vital. This dissolution happily divorced liberalism from its early tight bind with the rational. It rejoined a theme that one sees in Shakespeare – the theme that the social order is a more than metaphorical expression of larger orders – the division of labor is implicit in the very human body, the hierarchy of command is implicit in the revolution of the planets around the sun, etc. Of course, these ideas emerge in Plato’s Republic too. Shakespeare’s source for Coriolanus is Plutarch’s life, translated by North.

Shandian Hacking, part 2

So far, the essay as I’ve laid it out is pretty straightforwardly philosophical. But after Hacking makes the case for Canguilhem’s case for seeing tools and machines as organs, he goes off the tracks – or rather, he goes on a lot of interesting tracks that involve things like Voodoo, cyborgs and UFOs, Donna Haraway’s thesis that in the late twentieth century the line between machines and organisms have been irreparably blurred, and what kind of thing a man on a bicycle is – is he a cyborg? Actually, if one goes back to the inventor of the word, he definitely is. Cyborg’s came out of space travel – as I’m sure our friend Northanger knows.

The word cyborg was first used in print in the September 1960 issue of Astronautics. It came with the definition: for the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated system unconsciously, we propose the name Cyborg (Clynes and Kline)

The name was made up by Manfred Clynes working with Nathan Kline. Kline was a distinguished psychiatrist, director of research at Rockland State Hospital in New York and teacher at Columbia University. His foret was psychopharmacology. Those who consult the Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1996) will learn that he won numerous awards, some internal to his profession ( the Adolph Meyer award) and some more public (a New York Newspaper Guild Page One award in Science). He was a good deal more colourful than that. He was Poap Doc Duvalier’s personal psychiatric consultant, and he also established clinics in Haiti. The favours were mutual: he had a fine private collection of Haitian, popularly known as Voodoo, preparations and herbals, with which he is said to have experimented freely. He was an advisor on psychological topics to Hollywood producer Norman Lear, so whatever psychology appears in Lear’s movies or TV scripts had Kline’s imprimatur. (this supplementary information is derived from telephone interviews with family members.”

Kline was quite the Cold War magus and eminence gris. Oh, spirit of Pynchon, be with me now!

“And yet there is another twist in this story that I cannot omit. It has a lot to do with the mind, though here one imagines that it is Kline speaking and not Clynes. It interest me because Rewriting the Soul (Hacking 1995) is, among other things, a very extensive study of multiple personality and dissociation. Kline was apparently stirring the dissociative soup way back in 1960
… hypnosis per se may prove to have a definite place in space travel, although there is much to be learned about the phenomena of dissociation, generalization of instructions, and abdication of executive control.

We are now working on a new preparation which may greatly enhance hypnotizability, so that pharmacological and hypnotic researches may be symbiotically combined.

Ross (1966) is a book [sic – I believe Hacking is referring to Colin Ross’ The Osiris Complex] written by a leader in the field of dissociative disorder suggesting that the epidemic of disturbed people having flashbacks of alien abduction into outer space is due to what he calls CIA experiments in hypnosis, drugs and mind control in the 1960s. The unhappy people with these memories are really recalling trance states induced by mad scientists in the employ of the United States Government. Most readers, including myself, take this as proof that Ross is himself a bit touched. But now I wonder, what was going on at Rockford State?”

Surely this is a valuable trivial pursuit fact, no? The most popular comedy shows of the seventies received their psychological input from the inventor of the cyborg and a scientist deeply interested in mind control? Ho ho ho - I come from generation fucked. Now I know who did it!

But we have only covered one of the homonymous duo, doeppelgaengers sprung into the Cold War future by way of Freud and Philip Dick. To get back to our question about the bike for a second, the first cyborg devised by this duo was simply a rat, which had some kind of osmotic pump set to a feedback pattern that would pump chemicals into it, get some appropriate responding chemical cue and modify its injections. The point eventually, our Small ones (Kleins) (“At one time the elves are small enough to creep through key-holes, and a single potato is as much as one of them can carry; at another they resemble mankind, with whom they form alliances, and to whom they hire themselves as servants; while some are even said to be above the size of mortals, gigantic hags, in whose lap mortal women are mere infants” – Superstitions of the Highlands) thought, was to make man less robotlike – once in space, Hacking points out, an astronaut was to be as free in his capsule as the homunculus was in Descarte’s brain – freer! For the homunculus didn’t carry around a feedback rat.

Well, maybe I’ll do one more post on this.

shandian Hacking

There’s nothing LI likes better than a good Shandian essay. Robert Merton used that phrase to refer to his essay concerning the origin of the phrase, “on the shoulders of giants” (as per Newton’s mock humble saying, if I have seen farther, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants), and what he means by it is that the essay is the correspondent of the kind of search you might go through looking through your personal papers for one particular paper. Such searches tend to get go into odd corners – one finds oneself reading a diary entry, when you meant to be looking for your passport – that are constrained by the fact that you are going through one loosely organized jumble. The grandfather of the Shandian essay is surely Plutarch, whose inquiries into the “word ei graven over the gate to Apollo’s temple at Delphi’, or the origins of Isis, tend to swallow up vast masses of ancient learnedness on the way to solving rather trivial problems.

Given this debauched taste of mine, I was very pleased, yesterday, to stumble upon Ian Hacking’s essay, Canguilhem among the cyborgs. LI is tempted to say that Hacking is the kind of analytic philosopher that only a continental could love, but this is a bit of an exaggeration. Still, although he comes out of a mainstay analytic philosophy hub, Stanford, where he was one of Suppe’s students, I believe, like other Stanford pragmatists (Cartwright, Dupre), he has somehow absorbed a ‘tone’ that isn’t well liked in analytic philosophy, where dullness is considered a mark of truth. He is also quite trans Atlantic, very much at home in France. His essay in honor of Georges Canguilhem is about one of those French masters known mainly as a mere name in these here states. The essay makes the case that Canguilhem, much more than any of the big name muckety mucks like Wittgenstein or Heidegger, was much more radically anti-Cartesian than is usual in our philosophy. Descartes has become the philosopher one loves to blame for dualism, and one loves to use as a signpost for an old style of thinking that we have all surpassed. Of course, that’s all bullshit.

“It is commonly said, nowadays, that in philosophy we have overcome Descartes, dualism, the ego and epistemology, thanks to the work of famous men, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, or less widely known earlier figures. Deeply involved as I have been, from time to time, with the thought of Wittgenstein and some of those earlier figures, such as Pierce, Herder and Hamann, I have never been much impressed by the alleged termination of Descartes. In many respects I find more in common between Wittgenstein and Descartes than difference. You will see from my first tow epigrapsh that by highly selective quotation I can even make Descartes sound like Donna Haraway, the feminist socialist student of the sciences who delights in metaphor and the blurring of distinction.”

The epitaph from Descartes is, well, fucking beautiful:

… toutes les choses qui sont artificielles, sont… naturelles. Car, par exemple, losqu’une montre marque les heures par le moyen des roués don’t elle est faite, cela ne lui est pas moins naturel qu’il est à un arbre de produire ses fruits.

Which reminds me of Rene Char, except that it is better than Rene Char.

However, according to Hacking, Canguilhem made an observation about Descartes, and an observation about organisms and machines, that helped Canguilhem, in some slight way, surpass Descartes. LI should humbly remonstrate that the image of philosophy as a race in which figures are passed by seems to be a misunderstanding of what philosophy does. It isn’t a science in that sense. But, with that protest lodged, this is how Hacking figures that Canguilhem gets by the ever tricky Rene: Canguilhem “saw how central to Descartes was the idea that animals are machines.” And he begged to differ. Machines, to Canguilhem, are extensions of man – and that phrase, which reeks of McLuhan, is oddly unfished for resonances by Hacking, who is teaching, after all, in Toronto. But never mind that – Hacking’s point is Canguilhem points to a moment in Descartes thinking about the machine and the soul that is supposed to prove, in a sense, that animals are machines – as well, although this is sotte voce, as the human body.

“Since the body is a machine, it must in principle be possible to build a machine just like a human body. For technical reasons, we cannot do it. In principle, we could make a bird that would fly, but we are unable to make small enough springs and coils to pull the trick off. So Descartes imagines God – not man – making a perfect automaton for the body of a human being. Yet, according to Canguilhem, this is nto straightforward. The notion depends upon an idea of God the Fabricator and on there already being living creatures upon which the machine is modeled. Neither we nor God get beyond teleology. Machines are so made because we make them for a purpose, or in imitation of something already alive. Canguilhem’s fascination with the vital, with life as a precondition, is evident here.”

Now one might reply that since 1952, when the essay was written we have – in this round of cards between the organic and the machine – played some more, and the machine is currently ahead, with DNA as the machine. The molecules are the machine. And yet it isn’t so simple as that after all, for this machine doesn’t work as a machine without a code. And when it does work as a code, it only works as life. It isn’t really clear why we should call the molecules plus code – that thing which distinguishes DNA from any other crystal in the universe, as far as we know – a machine, except that we have built machines – plunging us back into the logical problem of God building the machine in Descartes’ imaginary instance.

Hacking, having led us to the man-machine breakdown in 1952, next goes on a long journey through cyborgs. Which, in my next post, I’ll write more about.

...

and, a shout out there for the GOP on this night of nights. Lovely that your president fucking broke you, as he has fucking broken everything in his reign of error. So, here it is - Death of a Party.

GIANTS!

Giants Giants Giants!
To my far flung correspondent, Tom S., to Amie, to all LI NYC readers - have fun at the parade!

A fly as big as a blue whale

“I met murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh”

Saint Augustine remarked that man is born between a shit and a piss; it is the ambition of the Bush administration to die there. The shit, of course, has been amassed over eight shameful and inglorious years, that began in an act of supreme and criminal negligence – the Bushian indolence as our nineteen gremlin hijackers were able to pretty much do what they wanted (a crime so foretold that they could have put an advertisement in the fucking newspapers), followed by the shock and awe of a paniced president who came to his senses when his advisors pointed out the political advantage he could reap by not doing his simple duty to crush the very crushable al qaeda. The murder of Americans – and the numbers mount, from the incompetent war in Afghanistan to the crime of Iraq – was a small price to pay for robbing the wealth of the country and putting it in the pockets of the few and unscrupulous; as for the massive death toll inflicted on the Iraqis, the untold suffering, the four million refugees, here was a supreme Bushian performance piece indeed. While vacuous chants were intoned by our clueless President to a liberty he so dislikes in the U.S. that he has done everything in his power to strangle it, our real politics consisted of ethnic cleansing, bombing the innocent, razing cities, and arming militias. Our best friends, the Saudis, meanwhile, financed al qaeda and financed a Sunni insurgency, to which our reply was to censor this macro story from ever being told at length in any American newspaper – and certainly not on American tv, a machine that produces cretinization, 24/7.

Even the bubble enabled by Bush appointees was shabby, as far as bubbles go – having fixed the system so that productivity gains didn’t budge the incomes of the 80 percent of Americans who work for a living, instead of whatever it is the upper management class does, the Bushites contrive to make every house its own little casino – tap the automatic wealth that comes from selling property amongst yourselves even as you ignore the natural limit set by your declining incomes! What a great scheme, and how the Gaderene swine, peckerheads and warriors by proxy, rushed into it! The ownership society, as sponsored by Visa and Mastercard.

And now we have the brilliant budget, the last budget, the testament of the collected thinking of the man his admirers call President Backbone – a name that is too modest by half, as this is a president who not only exhibits his spinal column, but whose whole skeletal system seems to be exo- like the star of that b movie, The Fly. What a great enterprise it is – a true call to slavery in the name of freedom. Having spent trillions fighting the approximately ten to thirty thousand paramilitaries of al qaeda, with the tremendous result of swelling their ranks and giving them an untold amount of importance in both Pakistan and Iraq, the budget makes a joyful sound to the Lord of Flies by proposing a seven percent increase in the military budget. It is by these increases that President Exoskeleton retains the affections of the media – for the core of the political media, based in D.C., has been bathed in the butter of federal spending like nobody’s business for the past eight years. These fat and sassy eunuchs have never had it better, and though they believe – repressing their inner astonishment – the polls that proclaim how disgusting the mass of Americans find the leader of this country, in their heart of hearts they would follow the President to the gates of hell and back – at least by proxy. That is, they’d sternly teach us that all serious people support sending America’s army, recruited from those clueless masses outside the Gated Community, into whatever fucked up orgy of vanity and peculation the Grand Old Party wants to give. It is a party Party, and the invites long ago went out to our ersatz opposition party to join it. And join it they have, protecting hedgefunders from taxation here, giving the President a chance in Iraq there, and in general enjoying the D.C. butter as they’ve sold out their constituencies at rock bottom prices.

Ah, but let us look at what the Lord of Flies has wrought:

Bush reviewed the budget with his Cabinet. He held aloft a computer tablet that contained the budget details. ''This is a good, solid budget,'' the president said.

''It's not only an innovative budget in that it's coming to Congress over the Internet. It's a budget that's balanced -- gets to balance in 2012 and saves taxpayers money.''

The spending proposal, which shows the government spending $3 trillion in a 12-month period for the first time in history, squeezes most of government outside of national security, and also seeks $196 billion in savings over the next five years in the government's giant health care programs -- Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Even with those savings, Bush projects that the deficits, which had been declining, will soar to near-record levels, hitting $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009. The all-time high deficit in dollar terms was $413 billion in 2004.

Hazlitt, in his life of Napoleon, wrote:

“Mr. Southey somewhere accounts for the distress of the country in 1817 (and probably at present) by the prhase of “the transition from war to peace”, and emphatically observes, that the war was a customer to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Sheffeld alone, to the amount of twenty millions a year. Be it so: but if this were all, and this were really a benefit and source of riches to the country, why not continue to be a customer to these manufacturers of steel and brass in peace as well as war; and having bought and paid for so many cannon and so much gunpowder, fire the off in the air as well as against the French?”

That was a true moment of prophecy. Except, of course, that we have learned how not to use the accursed share at all – here’s a government proclaiming that we are in WWIV in Iraq, while it spends the major portion of the military budget on non-Iraqi items. It would be as if Roosevelt had proposed a military budget in 1942 in which the major portion of it was not dedicated to the war at hand, but to … well, to futuristic wars that bloody minded peeps envision in their think tanks.

An odious end to a wholly odious administration.

It has been our constant hypothesis over the years at LI that this planet cannot forever support an unlimited number of blue whales, who have weights of up to 300,000 pound. That is, the planet cannot indefinitely support a system that requires of the human beings in it to go about using, on average, use as much energy in a year as a creature more than a thousand times their size. Long ago, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote an essay entitled,On Being the Right Size. Here’s how it begins:

“The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high—about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.”

Now, of course, culture is a great jimmy-er of nature. We’ve found innumerable and ingenious ways to pick Nature’s locks. However, ‘we’ did this while, all unconsciously, developing a system about us, the way an oyster unconsciously extrudes a shell. We know, now, what that system is costing – and we are doing nothing about it that would save it in any way. The scattered ingenuities that created it have now become so much shit for the richest flies to land on, led by President fly, whose minions are too busy jerking off to videos of Iraqis being shot or bombed to know that they are even putting their own pretty white asses in peril. On the contrary, we are wasting money as it has never been wasted before on triviality, murder, and plunder.
What a way to spend eight years!