The phantoms of ideology

You can skip this boring part ...

LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, this one has been about honor – Chabert defending Marx from Derrida’s “cynicism” and misprision – or outright fraud - and LI lagging behind, defending the honor of Derrida. But that’s a harder task to do for a writer who was born into the decline of the honor culture than to do for a writer who was conversant enough, in his student days, with dueling clubs. So I have defended, instead, a Derridian approach to Marx – which is to see Marx’s texts not in terms of doctrines that become lessons to repeat, but as historically situated, and full of conceptual choices that pull against each other. Some are derived from ripostes and occasions and gradually entombed in the massive work - this is true, I believe, of Marx's materialism. Or, just the reverse, promising tendencies from the romantic years are not fully developed - Marx's idea of alienation, for instance, which never seems to be socially embedded to account for alienation across the classes. In any case, Derrida’s Specters of Marx is about entering the texts by a back way – for instance, by way of a persistent metaphoric – and which is fully connected to the history it made, which is, it should be needless to say, a preeminently European history. We are of course speaking of a writer who self consciously represented the framework for the European alternative in German history – as the cliché has it, Zivilisation vs. Kultur. The non-European tendency in German history – that urge to become the Volk der Mitte, which Thomas Mann writes about in The Reflections of a Non-Political Man – project a system of rejections that led to a bad end. One of the Chabertian themes that has been helpful to me in the past is her sense of how composite, how full of input from the outside, is Europe, and how full of forgetting the Eurocentric position has to be. I’ve been rather surprised that she has skipped this theme in Marx, for it is, after all, one of the major themes in the Specters – those ghosts from the “superstitious” past that must be chased away in the name of science. Among other things, the German Ideology is about the border of that so called European form of thinking.

Well, the duel has been conducted with some fierceness on both sides. And it has spread, I’m pleased to say. Tables have been kicked over, bystanders sprayed with breaking glass. Or at least there has been some responses, here and there. I particularly note Praxis, who has had a number of posts about Marx and Derrida.

And start reading here:

And now our frequent commentor, Amie, has written an incredible piece on Marx and is allowing us to post it. Hooray!

She hasn’t given it a title. I’m tempted to chose one from the Three Musketeers - for instance, LES MOUSQUETAIRES DU ROI ET LES GARDES DE M. LE
CARDINAL. But instead, I’ll call it The Phantoms of Ideology
....................................................................................


CLOV (regard fixe, voix blanche). –
Fini, c'est fini, ça va finir, ça va peut-étre finir.(un temps.)

- Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, 1957.

I'm very late in entering the lists for the "duel" with the Colonel. If I haven't before, it's not that I'm afraid that I would risk losing my head in the duel, though that is highly likely. It has more to do with the fact that the set-up is more akin to lining up ducks in a tub and shooting at them from close range with an elephant gun. Where is the gallantry in that! The "production values" are not exactly water-tight. The tub has holes in it, the water leaks everywhere, the ammo gets all wet, and the ducks continue to speak in tongues. Or in French, which is the same thing after all.

But why quibble when the pay-off is that Derrida is a shorter Charles de Gaulle and an apologist for the Nazis, which is quite the dénouement.

Alas, the staging is such that it ends up shooting the hero of the drama in the chest. Poor Marx, his texts once again reduced to a doctrine, and him reduced to the role of an idealogue. I search on the Colonel's set in vain for the great Marx, the thinker, the revolutionary, the writer. The Marx who was too much of a thinker to hasten to conclusions or tailor them to suit the "facts" without submitting the facts or the cloth to scrutiny even if they fell apart in his hands, who was too much of a revolutionary to bow down to facts or reversals in fortune or to pass by catastrophes as if they had never happened, too much of a writer to not ceaselessly rework this texts and rectify them in the blinding light of events rather than succumb to the vanity of a finished work and the illusions of a total doctrine. Did he ever conclude?

The question I would like to ask concerns ideology. After all, the first post in the series began with bringing up ideology, of which the Colonel says that it might do or count for a "little something". What if ideology counted and did more that a little something for Marx, something he had to confront and account for and more than once?

The good folk who have Marx well in hand and the Marx-Engels Werke at their fingertips will undoubtedly know the rather strange way in which ideology flits in and out of those texts. The term of ideology is everywhere in the texts from 1845-1846, reduced to a few marginal occurrences between 1847-1852, and then is almost nowhere to be found, until returning rather prominently in the 1870s. I'm not bringing this up as a matter of mere philological interest, there is something else involved.

Let's take up The German Ideology. I can hardly get into the entire history of the composition and publication of this text, but why does this text essentially written (mostly by Marx) between 1845 and 1846 not get published till 1932? Is it only because of the difficulties of finding a publisher, something that Marx was to endure more than once, or is there something else as well? And may I add, that one has merely to look at the composition and history of this text and the related correspondence between Marx and Engels to see that the two do not exactly share the Colonel's opinion that Max Stirner is a feeble-minded idiot not worth reading. On the contrary they go to considerable time and trouble to read, discuss and respond to Stirner and at some length. The "Saint Max" section in The German Ideology accounts for two-thirds of the entire text and the debate with Stirner is no less present in the first section on Feuerbach. Indeed, Engels is one of the first readers of Der Einzige und Sein Eigeuntum and recommends, even insists, that Marx do so. If Marx's response to Stirner is in scathing terms – which is hardly unusual for Marx – it is because Der Einzige und Sein Eigeuntum poses not a few problems for Marx and Engels, hits home, as it were. As I am not concerned here with Marx's setting of accounts with Stirner but with Marx's own settling of accounts with ideology, let me pass on and briefly rehearse some of the well-known themes of The German Ideology.

The guiding thread of the text is the division of labor from which Marx deduces the successive forms of property and State. The two main intertwined threads of the text are production and ideology. Marx analyses man's productive activity from its beginning which is man confronting nature to its end point which is bourgeois/civil society. Much of the text is organized around the notion of production and one might even say that here Marx is proposing a social ontology of production as it is production that defines and shapes man's being (Sein) and his "ensemble" of social relations. For to recall the much debated and discussed sixth thesis on Feuerbach (with its mixture of French and German): "But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations" (das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse).

Enter Ideology. With its abstractions and illusions – and its uncanny power. Let's first consider the most common reading of ideology in this text. It is one that is fostered by the rather misleading form of the text as it is published (which occurs in 1932 let us recall.) It is not a little misleading as it actually inverts the order in which the text was written by placing the polemical part second as if it had secondary value or was but an appendix and putting the first part at the head, presenting it as if it was a stand-alone account of "historical materialism". So then ideology can be read in terms of the development of the division of labor, can be read as a derivation of the "base" of "real life" and production. It would then be a matter of demystifying the mechanisms of illusion and of "autonomization" by which a "fantastic" world replaces – substitutes for – reality. The matter is of course not so simple or reassuring. For one thing, as we shall see, the process of demystification, the reduction of the "fantastic" world and the access to historical reality for Marx is only possible through historical change – revolution. But in such a reading of ideology one can at least rest secure and be (re)assured that in the realm of real life and the realm of production there is no ideology. Nor, of course, any ghosts.

Marx's account of ideology is undeniably an attempt at demystification, an attempt to dissolve the distortions of social relations and of intercourse(Verkehr) between individuals. Marx regularly uses this term Verkehr in order to underscore relation in both its productive and communicative aspects. And when he speaks of illusions he also makes use of metaphors, and ones with a venerable history, as for example, "the inversion of reality" in a cave. Permit me the "obvious" statement that metaphor as well as all the common figures of rhetoric are not absent from Marx's texts, far from it, his texts are a battleground of rhetorical figures. Marx is a master at marshaling a formidable array of tropes and marching them into battle. I'm not going to even attempt to delve into the question of the rhetorical modes of Marx's texts or of Marx's "style" or rather styles, since there is more than one, in different texts and quite often in the same text. I'm in over my head as it is. Anyway, the metaphor of "an inversion of reality" in a cave goes back a long way. The "owner" of this cave, one is told, was a rather crafty idealist with a theory about the power of ideas. Now, Marx's account of ideology in The German Ideology is not just about illusion, it is also about the power of ideas. Or more precisely, how ideas and ideology can take hold, take power, dominate. The question of domination is central to Marx's account of ideology. To dominate here has to be understood in two senses, more evident in the German word herrschend. It is a matter of dominating through exercising power but also by holding sway, reigning, extending universally.

In The German Ideology, ideology refers to the dominating class. The proletariat are entirely without it, they are outside ideology, pure of it, if you will. This last point is essential. It is from this point of view that Marx's account of ideology takes place. The German Ideology is considered to be Marx's clearest account of the proletariat as a Universal Class. But if one looks a little more closely, Marx does not present the proletariat as a class which would raise its particular interests in turn into universal interests, which would only be to repeat the process of mystification. Rather remarkably, we find Marx describing the proletariat not simply in terms of class but as a Masse, as a mass or as masses. But if it is not the proletariat's own proper particular interests which make it the bearer of change, transformation and revolution which Marx clearly considers it to be, what is it? It is precisely the proletariat's position outside of all ideology. The proletariat is eigentumslos (propertyless) and without any "particular quality" (Eigenschaft), and as such it is without illusions, absolutely Illusionslosigkeit. It is this extreme denuded position of the proletariat that is beyond ideology and without illusions that for Marx primes it for change and revolution. It is from this perspective or point of view that Marx can write in GI of a "real movement" that has nothing to do with the old order and abolishes it, and of the discovery - or promise - of "the language of real life" (Sprache des wirklichen Lebens).

It is not a matter of wondering why Marx does not consider or articulate a proletarian ideology. The matter rather is that if there is something like that, if the proletariat "has" ideology, well then the entire edifice constituting materialism in GI and its chain of equivalences between materiality, production, practice, history and revolution starts to give way, fall apart. Things, from this perspective, are not very different in The Communist Manifesto written the following year (1847). There again Marx writes of a proletariat which is totally Illusionslosigkeit and which has nothing to do with nation nor religion nor family nor morality nor political-juridical illusions. There again, as such, the proletariat is in the position of destroying the dominating class and its ideology and ending its reign. If in this process the proletariat is to become the dominant class in turn it is only to dissolve all classes and domination. Transparency of life and language and of intercourse. Such is the promise – of revolution. Exit ideology.

Enter 1848. Arrival of Revolution. 24 February in Paris. 13 March in Vienna. 18 March in Berlin. Le Printemps des peuples. The people will soon pay dearly for their springtime. In June, massacre of le peuple in the streets of Paris. A number of French socialists defect to bonapartism. Apathy of the proletariat faced with the coup d'état. Catastrophe. Instead of the dissolution of bourgeois power, one is confronted with the dissolution of the proletariat hope.

If the events of 1848-51 are a crushing blow for Marx, it is the measure of the man that he will face up to them and try to take their measure. Not the least of which is that Marx has to acknowledge and to confront the fact that the proletariat is not immune to ideology. The proletariat – the propertyless (eigentumslos) – somehow possesses or is possessed by ideology, which is not a little uncanny. Now, from this point on, the term of ideology virtually disappears from Marx's text. Which is not to say that the theme or its analysis does so. Even if not named, it is present everywhere in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), a text which is also about repetition and how the past can haunt the present. Here again, Marx attempts to account for the mystification and the power, the domination that past figures (whether nationalist or historical or religious, republican or imperial ) exercise on the present and on the actors of 1848. Can it all be determined in terms of class interests? When Marx addresses the problem of the passage from the "class in itself" to the "class for itself" the very schematic of "two classes" splinters in a series of subdivisions. It would appear that in the time of revolution, when time "accelerates", classes decompose as well-defined entities defined by distinct and simple interests capable of finding direct political representation. Here again, when Marx speaks of revolutionary conflict and struggle he doesn't do so simply in terms of class, but rather in terms of masses, of mass movements. Marx doesn't say "classes make history" but that "masses (or men en masse) make history."

Let me quote a famous passage from the The Eighteenth Brumaire:

"Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and as the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets the native tongue in the use of the new."

Here again we find the question of revolution related to a "new" language, the language of real life of which The German Ideology spoke or promised. In order to learn to use this new language and to properly appropriate its spirit as the spirit of revolution, why is it necessary to forget and efface the maternal, the mother tongue?

After 1848, Marx's main project is of course the immense research that goes into the writing of Capital. In this text the question of ideology is reworked in terms of the famous analysis of the commodity fetish and its "theological niceties". Here again one finds the theme of domination, of the market subjecting everyone and everything to its reign and power. And one finds that the enigma, the secret, the mystery, the mystification it would appear is all on one side, the side of commodity value and the famous turning and dancing table. Use value is apparently pure of such craziness. From whose point of view, one might wonder? The properties (Eigenschaften) of the thing of use-value relate to man, to what is proper to man and his needs. But what exactly is proper to man?

There is a famous scene where Marx wonders what the commodity-value would say, if it could speak. "If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse (Unser eigner Verkehr) as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values." Marx does not say what use-value would say, if it could speak. And, I wonder how a dialogue between use-value and commodity-value would go?

But, taking our cue from Marx, let us try and think what use-value would say, if it could speak. Would it say, "take me, I'm yours"? Is that what the bit of wood, the little piece of nature would say? Or would she be silent, keep her secret to herself? Phusis kruptesthai philei . Or would she lament.

"...all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language (though 'to endow with language' is more than 'make able to speak'). This proposition has a double meaning. It means, first, that she would lament language itself. Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature.[...] This proposition means, second, that she would lament. Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language. It contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath..."
(Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, 1916)

After almost twenty years of immense unremitting research and writing, the first volume of Capital is published in 1867. The Workers Bible, as Engels calls it. A text that can also be read as an attempt to account for 1848. Then comes 1870, and the Franco-Prussian war. And 18 March 1871, the Paris Commune, or more simply La Commune. Ah, Vive la Commune! Alexis de Tocqueville recounts in a letter how a certain Thiers had proposed to the National Assembly in 1848 that they wipe out le peuple de Paris. This time, the butcher Thiers will not let the opportunity go by. The semaine sanglante is unsparing and is followed by massive deportations. Marx does respond with memorable pages devoted to the Paris Commune. But he has to acknowledge that once again events have not followed the directing forces and conflicts of history and politics as he had envisaged them. Once again, there are passions and other factors that cannot simply be reduced to the class struggle. And if revolution took place in France rather than Britain, this didn't quite follow the "logic" of it occurring from a crisis in capitalist accumulation. The writing of Capital is suspended in the midst of a chapter on "classes", and Marx will attempt to begin again. After the destruction of the Commune and the dissolution of the International, what response did Marx have to the question of "historical change"? After 1870 as in 1848, Marx has to acknowledge that history cannot simply be thought in terms of imminence or progressive maturation, as there is an irreducibly unforeseen and unexpected aspect to what comes to pass, arrives. In other terms, there is a non-contemporaneity to historical time, the time is out-of-joint.

So let me simply ask this. If we acknowledge that these questions of ideology, of historical change and time, remain for Marx insistent, open-ended questions that he takes up again and again, then it seems to me difficult to argue that Derrida in Spectres de Marx is somehow dismissing or mystifying Marx. On the contrary, it is precisely these questions that he attempts to renew and re-think. And if one were to say that these questions are of secondary importance for Marx, this would be, it seems to me, to dismiss and mystify a great deal of Marx and of the history in which his thinking is inscribed and to which it responds.

To say that there is no pure exit from ideology, which would be the ultimate ideological ruse, is not to reduce everything to it but to mark it as a site of conflict and struggle. As is history and the language of real life.

I have been suggesting that 1848 was "decisive" for Marx. Let me just point out that in Spectres, Derrida explicitly "links" the "New International" to 1848: " La 'nouvelle Internationale'[...] C'est un lien d'affinité, de souffrance et d'espérance, un lien encore discret, presque secret, comme autour de 1848".

But this is not say, of course, that there are no differences between Marx and Derrida. Let me refer to just one of them. It relates to Marx's phrase, "let the dead bury the dead." As one knows, this is a phrase that Marx uses more than once, in his texts and in his letters. Derrida does not follow Marx in this, but insists that one must [il faut] not let the dead bury the dead. I was reminded of the weight and justice of Derrida's insisting on this by a recent post here at Limited, Inc I am also reminded of a woman who wrote in Marx's mother tongue and who, in the wake of the Second World War when apparently all the horrors and crimes and ghosts had been laid to rest and all was sweetness and light, was not finished with mourning and the dead and crimes in the present. "I've often wondered, and perhaps it has passed through your minds as well, just where the virus of crime escaped to – it cannot simply had disappeared from our world twenty years ago just because murder is no longer praised[...] Indeed, I maintain and will attempt to produce the first evidence that still today many people do not die but are murdered."( Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza, 1966)

The phrase, let the dead bury the dead, occurs in a very famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire: "In order to arrive at its own content the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead." This seems to me a terrible price to pay in order to arrive at one's own content. Call me weak for saying so. I will accept and even affirm such "weakness". But, let me ask, is this even possible, does one arrive at one's own content in this way? For what if this phrase, this very phrase which claims to break free of the past, to arrive to its own time and seize the day, is a repetition of the past and more than once and more than one time.

I can think of at least two. There might be others. One is Christ who repeats the phrase twice (Matthew 8:22, Luke 9.60). I am not going to explore this repetition here, except to note that here is another instance of the Messianic in Marx's text. No, Derrida didn't somehow invent or import it into Marx's text.

For there is an even older repetition and it goes back to an "inaugural" text of the "West": Pericles' Funeral Oration. There one finds the interdiction of mourning, an interdiction which is directed at women. There one finds the valorization of strength and hardness, and softness is called an Oriental vice.

Why is it, I wonder, that a certain marxist materialism valorizes strength and hardness, lays claim to it, claims it for its own? And why is it so bothered by others, such as Derrida or Benjamin who are not afraid of weakness and even affirm it. Perhaps there is an indominatable strength of weakness? To recall the past, to call a revenant so that it comes from the future – an arrivant.

CLOV:
Do you believe in the life to come?

HAMM:
Mine was always that.

Theory Theory Theory

Robert I. Levy, in a very useful essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.” [219]

When speaking of a shift in the emotional customs that occurred in Europe in the time of the ‘social revolution’ marked, ultimately, by the rise of the industrial and market system, I am often at a loss for the terms to denote shifts that are a matter, so to speak, of keying one’s feelings and their meanings to social reality. It is not, of course, that happiness was unknown in Europe, or that voluptas was not experienced before the 17th century. However, new affective standards and expectations did arise, a new vocabulary and science displaced the vocabulary of the passions and the characterologies that corresponded to the passional system. In that sense, volupté, which expresses an ethical and affective mix around the sensation of pleasure, hypercognized a set of feelings that were hypocognized – that is, that were seen as moral failings, or were considered dishonorable, or wicked. That could even be seen as diabolical.

It is for this reason that I find it interesting to compare Quevedo’s comic account of interviewing a ‘catchpole’ – a tax gatherer – who was possessed by the devil with Theophile de Viau’s much cooler account, which has connotations of the sort of seigniorial disbelief which eventually flows into the romantic image of the great sinner – the Byronic atheist. I will translate that in my next post.

Here, I want to contemplate something else – the way in which these hypocognized emotions are caught in the narrative of adventure. Levy cites a Freudian psychologist, Ernst Schachtel, who claimed that childhood amnesia has to do with an acculturation process in which the child’s conceptual schemata for understanding his or her feelings is systematically starved, and a new schemata is put in its place. In a sense, the language of childhood is lost. Levy claims that the devastating encounter with European cultures has had an analogous effect on many indigeneous peoples. “The “starved schemata” are left as a basis for creativity, dreams, humor and transcultural understanding.” This negotiation between dominant and repressed schemata, I think, occurs in that dimension of culture I’m calling the third life – the life of reading. The transformed ethical and affective modalities are forged, in part, in adventure stories. These play a really critical role in the early modern context – they present a sustained critique of older forms of imitatio. The burlesque conflict between the ancients and the moderns is one aspect of this struggle.

Off to see the witches

LI is going to fumble around a bit. When I last left Robert Boyle, I was drawing an implicit contrast between his objections to the ordinary or scholastic use of the term “nature” and the use of nature as a touchstone of style in Theophile de Viau.

Since volupté emerges as a way of living in conjunction with the revival of Epicurus, and since that revival was a controversial part of the new learning – a way of introducing atomism into philosophy – “nature” is partnered with volupté among the libertines. In the chain of sememes, if volupté appears, soon nature will appear. Either as a term of reproach – the voluptuary who lives like a beast – or as a term of affirmation. The latter is new, it is modern, it is something that doesn’t yet have a full meaning. It is the promise of a program. Certainly, it leads the esprit fort to a negation – the negation of those things that are against nature, or supernatural. It is this slide towards skepticism that Boyle fears, and that we might not expect him to fear if we have the conventional expectations about the rise of science. He himself not only opposes the court libertines, among whom one can find his brother, but the skeptical attitude towards the supernatural. Though it might seem surprising that a writer who is so thoroughly imbued with the mechanical philosophy would be a believer in witches and ghosts, he not only is, but his belief in mechanism, as we saw, is fully incorporated into his theology, and that theology recognizes God, angels or spirits, and the human soul. Boyle contributed some witch stories to Joseph Glanvill, another broker between the Royal Society’s mechanism and the traditional belief in spirits, who was collecting them for a work defending the witch belief. In a note in his papers, Boyle set himself the standard objections against the commerce with the devil of “silly old women” and replied to it like this:

‘we men understand very little of the nature, costumes, & government of the iIntelligent creatures of the spirituall world: and particularly what concernes the Falne Angells or bad Daemons. And therefore they being themselves invisible to us, and capable of working in wayes that our sences cannot discern; and being Agents of great craft & long experience; tis no wonder that many of their actions, tho never so pollytickly contrived and carried on, should seem irrationall to us: who know so little of their particular inclinations & designes, and the subtil & secret methods in which they carry them on.” [Boyle on atheism, 32]

Theophile recounts his own visit to a possessed woman in Fragments in a very different spirit, having no regard for the Falne Angells, but casting a seigniorial glance at the exchange between the peasant and the priest. I’ll translate that in some future post. But I’ve been thinking that I need to cast my net further, here, since it isn’t only in France and England that Epicurus is re-introduced as an either respectable or dangerous model. In Spain, Francisco de Quevedo, also sought to revive Epicurus. And since Quevedo also was extremely interested in Daemons, I want to write about him. Also, he’s funny. And repulsive to the modern sensibility insofar as he truly finds cruelty funny. In 1990, Malcolm Kevin Read reviewed the recent critical literature on Quevedo and found a lack of it and attributed this to Quevedo’s “copraphilia”.

Quevedo lived about the the same time as Theophile de Viau, although he lived longer than Theophile. And Theophile was certainly aware of his work, as all the great Spanish writers were being read in France at the time. Meanwhile, Quevedo was certainly aware of some French writers, notably Montaigne, whom he quotes as an authority as great as the ancients. The quote comes in Quevedo’s essay on Epicurus. It was through Quevedo’s assimilation of Epicurus to the Stoics that a form of “Christian Epicureanism” was introduced into the Hispanic world, and notably in New Spain, where the vita of Epicurus was read and commented upon in the late 17th century by Siguenza y Gongora and Sor Juana. So we should remember that as Gassendi was writing his commentary on Epicurus, in Spain, Francisco de Quevedo was defending Epicurus from the slander that his notion of pleasure was all bodily. Quite the contrary, according to Quevedo, Epicurus put the whole of pleasure into virtue, and thus was as good as any Stoic – and in fact, a deal better. This unexpected defense of Epicurus, or at least unexpected if you have a stereotypical view of Habsburg Spain as a backwater is not unconnected with what Theophile calls writing a la moderne – Quevedo was, after all, the master of the criminal picaresque, and his El Buscar seems to repel the liberal imagination even now, with its delectation over the odors and struggles of human beings, those animate sausages, their scents, their money, their multiple paths to the gallows or the sick bed. Like Theophile – and in his own way, Boyle – Quevedo was concerned with dismantling what he viewed as an intolerable structure of linguistic obscurity, and sought the means to do it. His assimilation of Epicurus to the Stoics began a very common strategy, one that was defensively held by the erudits libertines, at least for public consumption, up until La Mettrie put paid to it by an all out attack on Stoicism in the eighteenth century. Epicurus seemed to Quevedo to be exemplary precisely because he was neither a Platonic nor an Aristotelian:

Epicurus placed happiness in pleasure and pleasure in virtue, which is such a Stoic doctrine that even the absence of this label does not render it unrecognizable. He freed the attention of his disciples from the stranglehold of the sophists’ dialectic, as if it were a load of rubbish; and if he mentioned dialectic, he did so only because in the classroom it is a large and important part of theology. This rejection of dialectic (by which one should understand that of the sophists), which was the greatest source of pride for other philosophyers, was the reason why Epicurus was loathed and discredited.” [Kray, 246]

Now, this is what I’m going to do. One of Quevedo’s great works is the Suenos, the Visions, which begins with an interview with a possessed beggar. I think I’m going to write a bit about that in my next post on these themes.

His name is Raheem Khalif

... fit for the kill

In the last month, more than 1,000 Iraqis have died in Sadr City, due to assaults mounted by the U.S. and Maliki’s forces. It is the largest assault by the U.S. since 2004 in Fallujah, with the difference that the criminally supine press has pretended it isn’t happening. In 2003, the press simply stenographed lies from the Bush administration. Now, it simply shuffles reality to page A-10, or doesn't report it at all. Although exception is made for the continuing spinning of White House lies – re the entirety of the journalism of Michael Gordon, who is still being printed in the New York Times, even though his latest “scoops” about Iranian supplied weaponry have been laughable, even by Soviet standards. This is from the LA Times:

“A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.”

It amazes me that they didn’t just go ahead with the show. Gordon would have written the same story, the NYT would lose more readers as the trustworthiness of the paper continues to sink, and the governing class, the second audience for whom such articles are really written, among whom the desire for hostility with Iran (take us to the next pretty war/oh don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why) is palpable, would have been satisfied.

Well, today there was a summary of the American collusion in wholesale murder at retail prices in Iraq – yes, we are talking about Blackwater, the company that kills Iraqis for sport. So, naturally, the FBI investigation of the deaths of the “17” (per the American press) murdered Iraqis has resulted in zip prosecutions. And the State Department has renewed the Blackwater contract for another year.

“Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.
But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.”

And then there is this, about Andrew Moonan, the murderer:

“The shooting death of the bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president in 2006 rankled the Iraqi government well before last September’s shooting. An off-duty Blackwater guard who American and Iraqi officials said had been drinking heavily was the sole suspect. The off-duty Blackwater guard, Andrew J. Moonen, who no longer works for the company and who is a former Army paratrooper, is now under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Seattle. Although Mr. Moonen has not been charged, his lawyer, Stewart Riley of Seattle, said that he had recently been in contact about the case with prosecutors from the United States Attorney’s Office in Seattle.
People familiar with the case said they believed that the Justice Department had recently concluded that it had found a way to skirt some of the jurisdictional problems that in the past made it difficult to bring charges in American courts for crimes committed by contractors in Iraq.

“I think they may come to a decision on what to do with this case in the next three or four months,” said one person familiar with the matter. Mr. Riley says that Mr. Moonen maintains his innocence in the shooting.”

You will notice that the “bodyguard” is unnamed. Which, in essence, is the killer’s mindset that runs through the American attitude in Iraq.

His name is Raheem Khalif

Our next prez

LI has gotten used to being a no future guy. Yesterday, however, I had one of those magic Obama moments that seem to infuriate those who don’t see anything magical about Obama at all. A friend sent me the upcoming Time cover, which has a great pic of our next prez.

Our next prez. Is that harp music I hear in the background?

It isn’t that the Great Fly’s legacy will vanish as the credits play November 8th. But the very idea of Obama being the U.S. president is so startling, on so many levels – so non-inevitable – that I even had a fleeting sense that the future contained me. Not something I have, well, ever felt about living in these here states.

However, the best post op analysis of what the last five months gave us in terms of a primary is Susan Faludi’s op ed piece today. I like Faludi novelistic sociology – it is in the best tradition of the Chicago Hangin’ out school, plus some symbolic interactionism well hidden from the reader, back in the guts of the mechanism – but I was not convinced by what I read of her post 9/11 thesis. It suffered from an acute lack of knowledge about the South. At the Great Fly’s back are not the captivity stories of Hawthorne’s 17th century New England, but the great dispossession of the Southeast Indian nations of the early nineteenth century. The smokin’ gun of the naughties has been Jacksonian racism, lock stock n barrel. The multiple and multiplying disasters that has brought down on the heads of those who engaged in it are still underappreciated in the Press, that playroom for the post frat Ivy league crowd.

I was surprised, frankly, that Faludi went off track, since her book on White masculinity in the 90s was so beautifully in synch with the time. Reaching back to the themes in that book, Faludi’s piece on why Clinton became a more attractive candidate as she became a shooter and a drinker, as she pandered to the gun totin’ gas guzzler crowd, resonated with my experience – I too, have thought of Clinton as the archetype of the punitive liberal, always looking for that edge where people are experiencing unallowed pleasure – an advocate of censorship from hip hop to computer games, always trying to make us a village – of the damned. And then there was Clinton the evil, the enabler of our run in Iraq. But the Clinton that sprang free and boxed Obama in the primaries was a much better figure all the way around. She had the humility of a great actress – she no longer worried about her ‘position’ or role, but put on personas as needed. The American presidential election, even now, as we watch the governing class transform itself into a kleptocracy, has its customs, one of which is that the candidates must ritually humiliate themselves. For a few decades after WWII, when decorum seized the elite, the process of humiliation was, to a degree, stifled. And of course the Republicans hate that whole humiliation thing – they can dish it out, but they can’t take it. However, the GOP long ago let the genie out of the bottle, and I think that even Republican candidates – as Mitt Romney’s agony showed – are now required to prostrate themselves.

One can go into the process with a pained look on one’s face, like Kerry, or one can lose all inhibitions, like Clinton. Obama supposed ‘elitism’ is all about his refusal to prostrate himself. Obama is right – he is not an actor, like Clinton, and racial codes in this country leave him little choice than to rely on his essential dignity. The thing is, he has essential dignity. He has essential dignity. My God. It is a rare trait. So, if I were Obama, I would stock up on the collected films of Laurence Olivier to figure out how to maximize his own actor’s persona. (although perhaps not this picture) Clinton obviously figured out that Joan Crawford was her l’wa – who knows what will come out of her mouth next? Some confession that she always thought George Wallace was cute? While Obama can’t and shouldn’t go so low, I think he could use Olivier’s sense of balance for the part he is about to play in this campaign against the rapidly decaying McCain.

killing a mouseketeer for the good of the state

"I'm Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous
(You want a piece of me)
I'm Mrs. Oh my God that Britney's Shameless"

The news stories about Britney are increasingly grim – as those of you who faithfully follow People, Us, and the National Star know quite well. As you’ll remember, the hardest working mousketeer has been prosecuted for not seeing “the harm in working and being a mama”. Quite right, but as soon as she revolted, the machinery of oppression came into play, and she was publicly kidnapped. First act: her children were wrenched from her when she showed them some of the fun side of life (which involved the kind of minor pecadillos – not using the safety seat, etc. - that drive the denizens of the gated community crazy, for there is nothing the G.C. believes more than cocooning its brats in an environment of permanent and ruthlessly enforced invulnerability, hence the monstrous SUV, the soccer mom car par excellence, hence the crammed prisons of these here States, hence the insatiable borrowing to keep a country whose main manufacture is serial war afloat), and were handed over to her talentless and Tartufian ex. The court system, that cat’s paw of patriarchy, did its part to shame and injure Britney just as she was showing – finally – some rock n roll promise. Second act: after her kids are kidnapped, she is kidnapped – in this case, by her parents, who are given the power to control this twenty eight year olds assets before she pisses them away – a process that she could do for the next forty years and never reach the bottom of her cash pile. In the timeless fashion of stardom, when the star threatens the money machine, the star is plunged into a psych ward, then dried out by the use of available patriarchal agents, and finally made abject and humble by the same media that has eagerly profited by their much photographed fall. This isn’t hypocrisy, it is factory work, it is plucking the chickens before you cut them up and plasticwrap them. Which of course happened to Brit. No more flashing her pussy, no more harmless Vegas pranks.

Well, the symbol of everything naughties is succumbing to the pressure, as it was obvious from the get go that she would. This terribly sad dispatch from the Associated Press makes LI, for one, itch to start an Amnesty International campaign: surely Britney is being held hostage by the worst aspects of capitalism in the era of the Great Fly:

“Britney Spears will be allowed expanded visits with her two young sons following a low-key child-custody hearing in Los Angeles.

Commissioner Scott Gordon at the Los Angeles Superior Court expanded her visitation rights in a move which will allow Spears to see her children for longer periods, while her former husband Kevin Federline retains custody.

Mr Gordon closed the hearing to reporters moments after the two stars were sworn in following a request by Spears' lawyer Stacy Phillips.

The 26-year-old pop star's appearance at the hearing, which was held behind closed doors, was a far cry from the spectacle of previous appearances.
A sombre Spears, wearing a brown polka-dot dress and white sweater, arrived early for the hearing flanked by her parents and lawyers.

Dozens of people witnessed Spears' courthouse arrival as a front-seat passenger in a white Land Rover, but it did not compare to the circus that surrounded the troubled pop star's January trip to the courthouse, when she arrived in a black minidress and gold platform shoes, then left before the hearing began.
Federline, 30, was granted custody of the couple's two children - two-year-old Sean Preston and one-year-old Jayden James - at that hearing.

The court heard police were called to Spears' home after she refused to relinquish one of the boys to a Federline bodyguard.

During a break in proceedings, Spears left the courtroom walking hand-in-hand with lawyer Blair Berk to a lift before returning minutes later.
Outside court, Mark Vincent Kaplan, Federline's lawyer, said the longer visits were "recognition of the progress that has been made". Spears smiled briefly but did not address questions as she left the hearing.”

Ah, the prisoner smiles briefly to the unctuous photographers, may they burn in hell. This is what happens when, in a flash of good sense, she refused to turn her children over to the ex’s hired thugs. Oh, on this ruin they will no doubt build somemoney making structure, but remember – a Mouseketeer was sacrificed to build the foundation.
Although I am hoping she takes the opportunity afforded by the court to flee somewhere. I’d recommend Sweden.

disgusting fancy

Among the scholars who are doing the history of science outside of the Whiggish framework - the latter referring, of course, to Herbert Butterworth’s famous phase about the framework that sees the history of science as essentially a progress - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s The Leviathan and the Air Pump is one of the most cited texts. It focuses on the New Learning in 17th century England, which was in many ways an extension of the Baconian experimental impulse. Robert Boyle was not only the premier experimenter, but, more than Bacon, the natural philosopher who set the rules for experimentation.

One of Shapin and Schaffer’s ideas is that the experimental method, depending on witnesses for its veracity, evolves a prose style of witness. Shapin and Schaffer point to Thomas Sprat’s injunctions about the proper mode of representation in his history of the Royal Society – which was, in effect, also a polemic on behalf of the society. Sprat enumerates the inveterate injury done by rhetorical ornament, which was at first the “admirable instruments in the hands of Wise Men” but now have turned disgusting – “They make the Fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorn’d; they are in open defiance against Reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that, but with its Slaves, the Passions; they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice.” In fact, as Sprat enumerates the faults of the ornate style, he himself falls into a Passion – “For now I am warmed with this just Anger” – but, apparently, this Slave is true to reason, rather than its betrayer. And although Sprat sees the ornaments of rhetoric as being almost beyond reform, he does make a very Protestant recommendation: “They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.” [Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, II,117-118]

Shapin has written a biographical sketch of Boyle that picks at what he was like as a person – and how one would, at this distance, ever found out. Born of a rich, rapacious pioneer of the land grab game in Ireland, an ennobled Elizabethan nabob who at one point might have been the richest man in the Kingdom, Boyle’s father despised Ireland – which was the source of his wealth – yet had his children taught Gaelic. Boyle himself certainly retained in his own voice the Irish English intonation, one that his tutors at Eton never could extinguish. More than that, Boyle he was a stutterer. According to his own account, Boyle picked up the stuttering habit when he was a boy from mocking the speech of others. Shapin imagines this might be Boyle mocking the Irish English of others.

While his elder brother was one of the great rakes at Charles II’s court, Boyle was an Anglican of a species now long extinct – an enthusiastic Anglican. Recent work on Boyle has emphasized this aspect of his intellectual character. While maintaining a corpuscular philosophy and advocating for the experimental method, Boyle wrapped these concerns in a general world view that allowed him to attack both Catholics and atheists for a wrongheaded view of God – both, in his opinion, being all too eager to pull God into his creation, and thus fumbling the very root of divinity: God’s exteriority to the world. It is that exteriority that allows God to be a supreme chooser – he can chose the way the world will be because he is not caught within it.

Boyle was an Anglican and directed his Free Enquiry, as well as his other philosophical and theological treatises, against both the Catholics and the ‘atheists” – the latter comprehending all who would make God immanent in nature, instead of standing outside it. But his brothers, as Shapin points out, were notorious Restoration rakes – the very type to be attracted to the libertine philosophy.

While the language of natural philosophy, for Sprat, is going to cast off the Wit’s devious metaphors and the disgusting fancies of the scholar in order to embrace the language of the artisan, Boyle, who was more noble than Merchant, had his own problems with taking the language of the vulgar for the instrument of the wisdom. For where, after all, are the vulgar getting their notions? Are they educated witnesses? Is there any way to escape ambiguity – which is, in its way, as disgusting as metaphor, insofar as it is not the plain way to truth:

“I have often look’d upon it as an unhappy thing, and prejudicial both to philosophy and physic, that the word nature hath been so frequently, and yet so unskillfully employ’d, by all sorts of men. For the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein ‘tis employed, either unintelligible, improper or false. I, therefore, heartily wish, that philosophers,m and other leading me, would, by common consent, introduce some more significant, and less ambiguous terms and expressions, in the room of the licentious word nature; and the forms of speech that depend on it: or at least decline the use of it, as much as conveniently they can…”

Boyle then gives 8 rules for avoiding the word: 1. Use the word God for natura naturans; 2. use the word essence, or quiddity (tho a barbarous term); 3 “If what is meant by the word nature” is what ‘belongs to a living creature at its nativity” – say, “the animal is born so” – or say that a thing has been generated such. 4. for internal motion – say that the body moves spontaneously; 5. use – “the settled course of things”; 6 for the “aggregate of powers belonging to a body” use constitution, temper, mechanism or complex of the essential properties or qualities; 7. when used for universe, use the word world, or universe; and 8. “If, instead of using the word nature, taken for either a goddess, or a kind of semi-deity; we wholly reject, or very seldom employ it.”

With those hand rules to hand, Boyle can then confidently enter into the thickets of Aristotelianism, before doing battle with the vulgar.