LI has been thinking that what I need to do, if I am to satisfy the armies of periodizers that inhabit my nightmares, is to go from showing how the conditions for the change in the attitude towards happiness came together in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (this is what all these themes over the past half a year have been about, captain!) to showing how happiness became a norm. That is, showing how it ended up filling three places normatively - as a feeling; as a judgment over the life order (or a judgment over lifestyles); and as a justification for political and economic arrangements. So far, I’ve been trying to show that those spaces haven’t always been connected by happiness. That this threefold social phenomena isn’t simply a matter of one feeling taking over from a previous dominant one. That the three places condition each other; and that in the wake of the slow vanishing of the human limit, there was play room for a number of affective political structures. Most notably, that of volupté. I’ve liked the often quoted phrase of Tallyrand’s said about the “sweetness” of life in the ancien regime, since that seems to point to something that is not a happiness norm, but that still held down this space between the desacralizing of the life order and the absence of a normative sense of happiness as the final legitimating end of social arrangements.
How would such a life be lived? Well, I can’t really do better than point to a quartet of Mozart’s operas: Le Nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte.
In reading Bruce Allan Brown’s book about Cosi fan tutte, I came across the name Johann Pezzl – probably a very well known name to Mozart fans. Myself, I hadn’t heard of him before. Pezzl was a fellow mason and an inveterate scribbler, briefly one of Joseph II’s spies (another instance of the adventurer), and the producer of a number of popular books about Vienna. There are some wonderful quotes from Pezzl in Brown’s book – alas, I haven’t been able to find Pezzl’s Skizze von Wien, although I have found a copy of Neue Skizze von Wien.
I don’t have much time this week, but I want to do a little Pezzl quoting. And I wanted to link to this great production of Cosi fan tutte. Act two, scene 16 in particular seems to gather together so many of the themes I have been treating that it makes gives me the interpreter’s vertigo. You will notice that Despina speaks swabian – Mesmer’s language – and tartar – the language of Catherine’s Siberian Shaman:
Come comandano
Dunque parliamo:
So il greco e l'arabo,
So il turco e il vandalo;
Lo svevo e il tartaro
So ancor parlar
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
Three stories about Gerhard Van Swieten, an enlightenment doctor
Everybody knows
that baby's got no clothes
Story one. Van Swieten was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. In 1740, Maria Theresa asked his advice about a terribly personal matter. She’d been married three years by then, and had no children. Van Swieten delivered the following famous prescription: “Praeteria censeo, vulvam Sacratissimae Majestatis, ante coitum, diutius esse titilandam.” That is, Maria Theresa should have her clitoris stimulated before coitus. It worked. Her shy husband Francis I tried it, and Maria Theresa went on to get pregnant a lot.
Such is the story recounted by Jonathan Margolis in O: the intimate history of orgasm. The story is almost certainly false. Van Swieten did not meet Maria Theresa until after treating her sister in 1744 – he probably came to Vienna in that year or a year later. By this time, Maria Theresa had had several children. Her first child was born before 1740, incidentally. Margolis did not, however, simply make up his facts. He’s repeating an old gynecologist’s tale. It was introduced into English by the indefatigable sexologist, Havelock Ellis, who know doubt took it from the indefatigable German sexologist, Iwan Bloch (1908). Bloch, in turn, might have taken it from several sources. It is odd that it had currency among German medical men, as biographies of Van Swieten were abundant enough that there was plenty of evidence that it couldn’t have happened. Interestingly, however, the latin prescription always appears with the story, although not always in the same wording. Bloch’s version is “titillatio clitoridis”, and he throws out the supporting story about Maria Theresa’s infertility. The story is the kind of thing that is repeated without being cited – I found one version in which Swieten urges Maria Theresa to stimulate her clitoris with a feather, for instance. Why would such a story gain such a confident currency? Wouldn’t it seem, at first glance, that no participant – neither Van Swieten nor Maria Theresa – would have any motive for setting such a consultation down on paper? That this story moves by itself is, I would say, putting on my best Freudian spectacles, evidence that it operates like a sort of dream in the collective male unconscious. The empress already is an irritant – a woman in power. The Herr doctor (to whom is ascribed, for no very good reason, powers of insight into sexuality that nothing in van Swieten’s career justifies) lords it over her, however, for she has one point, one little bud, of weakness – that royal clitoris – and of course he sees that the whole problem radiates from there.
It is rather amusing that as the story drifts along, it allots narrative places to all participants, depending on the season and ideological flavor of the month. Margolis, for instance, makes up a sexually naive husband, Prince Francis Stephen of Lorraine, to go with this story.
Story 2. Van Swieten was Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. She appointed him the head librarian of the court library. Being a product of enlightened Holland, a pupil of Boerhave, and an enemy of superstition, Van Swieten investigated the library and found it stuffed with alchemical, hermetic, spiritualist and astrological treatises. He had them all gathered up and burned, in spite of the howls of protests of all the hermetically inclined in Vienna.
This, too, is false. Although this story was reported in Van Swieten’s first biography, the Abbe Rautenstrauch, and it does reflect Van Swieten’s attitude towards ‘superstitious” garbage. At the time Rautenstrauch published his biography, this passage was protested by one of Van Swieten’s children, but his protests passed unheeded, and the act passed into the positivist legends of the 19th century. However, in 1906, the journal Janus published an article in which it published letters from Van Swieten showing that this action never happened.
Story 3. Van Swieten was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. In 1755, a report reached the court that bodies had been disinterred from a cemetery and burned in Olmütz because of the local belief that they were vampires. Maria Theresa appointed Van Swieten to investigate. In 1756, the court produced a against the vampire belief and forbidding these kinds of practices.
This story is true. Van Swieten is not only known, in a shadowy way, in sexology, but has become quite the villain in popular books about vampirism, where he is depicted as a hidebound reactionary. However, that picture is just the reverse of the one promoted in Enlightenment Europe, where Van Swieten’s book against the vampire belief was absorbed into the Voltairian battle against popular belief, with its consequent persecution of “witches” and “sorcerers”.
For a great blog on Habsburg vampires, go to magia posthuma.
that baby's got no clothes
Story one. Van Swieten was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. In 1740, Maria Theresa asked his advice about a terribly personal matter. She’d been married three years by then, and had no children. Van Swieten delivered the following famous prescription: “Praeteria censeo, vulvam Sacratissimae Majestatis, ante coitum, diutius esse titilandam.” That is, Maria Theresa should have her clitoris stimulated before coitus. It worked. Her shy husband Francis I tried it, and Maria Theresa went on to get pregnant a lot.
Such is the story recounted by Jonathan Margolis in O: the intimate history of orgasm. The story is almost certainly false. Van Swieten did not meet Maria Theresa until after treating her sister in 1744 – he probably came to Vienna in that year or a year later. By this time, Maria Theresa had had several children. Her first child was born before 1740, incidentally. Margolis did not, however, simply make up his facts. He’s repeating an old gynecologist’s tale. It was introduced into English by the indefatigable sexologist, Havelock Ellis, who know doubt took it from the indefatigable German sexologist, Iwan Bloch (1908). Bloch, in turn, might have taken it from several sources. It is odd that it had currency among German medical men, as biographies of Van Swieten were abundant enough that there was plenty of evidence that it couldn’t have happened. Interestingly, however, the latin prescription always appears with the story, although not always in the same wording. Bloch’s version is “titillatio clitoridis”, and he throws out the supporting story about Maria Theresa’s infertility. The story is the kind of thing that is repeated without being cited – I found one version in which Swieten urges Maria Theresa to stimulate her clitoris with a feather, for instance. Why would such a story gain such a confident currency? Wouldn’t it seem, at first glance, that no participant – neither Van Swieten nor Maria Theresa – would have any motive for setting such a consultation down on paper? That this story moves by itself is, I would say, putting on my best Freudian spectacles, evidence that it operates like a sort of dream in the collective male unconscious. The empress already is an irritant – a woman in power. The Herr doctor (to whom is ascribed, for no very good reason, powers of insight into sexuality that nothing in van Swieten’s career justifies) lords it over her, however, for she has one point, one little bud, of weakness – that royal clitoris – and of course he sees that the whole problem radiates from there.
It is rather amusing that as the story drifts along, it allots narrative places to all participants, depending on the season and ideological flavor of the month. Margolis, for instance, makes up a sexually naive husband, Prince Francis Stephen of Lorraine, to go with this story.
Story 2. Van Swieten was Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. She appointed him the head librarian of the court library. Being a product of enlightened Holland, a pupil of Boerhave, and an enemy of superstition, Van Swieten investigated the library and found it stuffed with alchemical, hermetic, spiritualist and astrological treatises. He had them all gathered up and burned, in spite of the howls of protests of all the hermetically inclined in Vienna.
This, too, is false. Although this story was reported in Van Swieten’s first biography, the Abbe Rautenstrauch, and it does reflect Van Swieten’s attitude towards ‘superstitious” garbage. At the time Rautenstrauch published his biography, this passage was protested by one of Van Swieten’s children, but his protests passed unheeded, and the act passed into the positivist legends of the 19th century. However, in 1906, the journal Janus published an article in which it published letters from Van Swieten showing that this action never happened.
Story 3. Van Swieten was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. In 1755, a report reached the court that bodies had been disinterred from a cemetery and burned in Olmütz because of the local belief that they were vampires. Maria Theresa appointed Van Swieten to investigate. In 1756, the court produced a against the vampire belief and forbidding these kinds of practices.
This story is true. Van Swieten is not only known, in a shadowy way, in sexology, but has become quite the villain in popular books about vampirism, where he is depicted as a hidebound reactionary. However, that picture is just the reverse of the one promoted in Enlightenment Europe, where Van Swieten’s book against the vampire belief was absorbed into the Voltairian battle against popular belief, with its consequent persecution of “witches” and “sorcerers”.
For a great blog on Habsburg vampires, go to magia posthuma.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The return of the pannier
This Sunday, forget Bill Keller’s frothing at the mouth about Westerners “kowtowing” to Beijing – not only is McCain bringing back Teddy Roosevelt but the whole glorious vocabulary of his time, which is like steak tartar in the mouth of our adorable, bloodthirsty MSM-ists! – and make a beeline to Caroline Weber’s article, The Belle Curve. There are those who have criticized LI’s obsession with the 18th century – but apparently we were simply mindmelding with today’s hottest fashion designers:
“But every now and then, a trend comes along whose sheer, unalloyed improbability startles even fashion’s strictest devotees. A case in point: the return this season of the amplified hip. From panniers at Louis Vuitton and Charles Nolan to crinolines at Alexander McQueen to peplums at Chanel, the fall/winter looks encourage women to channel PJ Harvey, who in ‘‘Sheela-Na-Gig’’ sang of her shapely charms: ‘‘I’ve been trying to show you over and over / Look at these, my child-bearing hips.’’ Incongruous as it may seem in an industry better known as an enemy than as a friend of female curves, today’s designers are bringing back the hourglass shape in all its bulging, bottom-heavy splendor.”
That’s right – panniers are back!
“At 18th-century Versailles, the panniered skirts of female court costume reached such vast widths that women had to enter rooms sideways. So great was the fear of getting stuck in doorways that young noblewomen trained for their first day at court with an exacting old gentleman who donned a ‘‘ridiculous, billowing skirt’’ of his own to lead the tutorial, according to the memoirs of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin. But one woman’s challenge is another woman’s opportunity. Just imagine the figure you’ll cut wedging your way onto a crowded N train in your new McQueen tutu. ‘‘Stand clear of the closing doors, please!’’ As the subway doors jam against your layers of stiffened tulle, all eyes will — I guarantee it — be on you. That’s what they call making an entrance.”
LI likes a jaunty skirt, but McQueen’s fall line doesn’t understand that billowing and jauntiness aren’t the same thing. Although we give McQueen a lot of points for that much commented upon gray mohair jacket dress worn by Rihanna in Elle. This is how McQueen explains his fall collection:
"I've got a 600-year-old elm tree in my garden," he said, "and I made up this story of a girl who lives in it and comes out of the darkness to meet a prince and become a queen." After a trip to India, the designer worked like a fiend for months in his studio, with images of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and the Indian Empire running through his mind. They were transformed into ballerina-length multi-flounced dance dresses, each more insanely exquisite than the last: A miraculous red-feather-fronted number turned to burst into a froth of creamy frills in back; another came covered in baby-fine knitted lace; a third had a pair of peacocks—again fashioned from cutout black lace—with their tail feathers fanning out over ivory tulle petticoats.
Interspersed were rigorously cut military tailcoats with taut pants detailed with military frogging, and slim brocade and cloque pantsuits with crisp white high-necked shirts. Then there was a stately parade of imperial-red and velvet jackets bedecked with millions of dollars' worth of antique Indian diadems and diamond neckpieces, and yet more incredible rich Empire-line saris and wispy dishabille transparencies. These were followed by a sequence of gold-encrusted, ermine-coated glory, echoing the heyday of Norman Hartnell and Hardy Aimes' fifties British couture as worn by Elizabeth II.
Whatever had triggered this new lease of inspired design, it went further than the mere rendition of fanciful costume for the sake of telling a story. Importantly, McQueen finally found it in himself to quash the confining, uptight carapace that had held back former collections, replacing it with a new sense of lightness and femininity.”
Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and the Indian Empire, did you say? I’m sorry: that’s a no go. As for the fifties British couture worn by Elizabeth II, where are my vials of wrath? I had them here a second ago...
One nice thing about this new trend is that Ysa Ferrer was obviously prescient, last year, in her mix of French Maid and Pompidour waif, as per To Bi or Not To Bi. It is a puzzle to LI that Ysa just doesn’t export to this country. I’ll never understand Americans.
Voltaire's shamans
Via dons maps
Even the Greeks were once, if you will, savages... – J.G. Herder
In the 1780s, both the model enlightened despots in Europe – Catherine II and Frederick of Prussia – suddenly found that the fashions were shifting. The old railing against superstition and spiritualism, which was so congenial to their hearts, was in conflict with the new interest in freemasonry, mesmerism, the hermetico-Egyptian philosophy – as Frederick the Great’s librarian, Abbe Pernety, called it – and, in Russia, with shamanism. Frederick’s nephew, who inherited the old man’s throne, immediately surrounded himself with a cabal of Rosicrucians. Catherine, who died in 1796, was already cracking down on what she regarded as the sinister power of the Masons in the late 1780s. She arrested the writer and publisher at the center of Russian freemasonry, Novikov – sentencing the old man to life in prison – and wrote a play, The Siberian shaman, mocking spiritualism as hypocrisy and faking, in much the spirit of Theophile de Viau exposing the fake possessed woman in 1620 – so much had libertine tropes migrated into the center of ancien regime power. Lai, Catherine’s shaman, is a Tartuffe of the steppe, so to speak. Or that may have been Catherine’s intention. However, he is given certain theatrical characteristics that are very different than the ceremonies of the devot in Moliere, as the translator of the play into English, ..., notes – he is, for instance, depicted as being in a sort of silent trance in the second act which goes on for some minutes, a unique stage direction in classical Russian theater. He is also depicted repairing boots – apparently a mark of someone truly low. Perhaps the idea that the feet are low, or dirty, or unclean, was behind Tolstoy’s obsessive shoe mending.
To my mind, though, the most interesting part of the play is the Shaman’s book. In a post (June 14 2008), I noted that the book and the savage became opposites after the discovery of the new world, although the idea that the savage might make books circulated on the fringe. In the eighteenth century, there was a controversy about whether the Inca’s quipu was a writing system, and whether the Inca priests made books of them – a position defended by Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, who was, perhaps not coincidentally, the center of Free masonry in Naples.
The constellation of savage, masonry – disguised as shamanism – and the book reappears in Catherine’s play in the scene in which Lai brags of his shamanistic book of fates. After Lai claims that he is occupied with the notion of non-existence and silence, two courtiers ask him where he gets his knowledge and he says – “in this book”
Sanov: What’s in your book?
Lai: Everything... everything... everything.
Sanov: Everything! But, for example, we who are present here. Are our first and last names in your book?
Lai. Knowledge is born with each person.
Sidor Drobin. So be it... but are we written in your book? That’s the question, do you hear?
Lai (Speaking quickly) Our characteristics are made up of ecstasy, of flow, of sustenance, of movement, of warmth, of the bitter root. Love and hate each have the same foundation, as do salt, action, oil and density.
Kromov: What chaos!
Sanov. What an unusual man!
Sidor Drobin. You can’t get an answer out of him... He’ll do only as he pleases.
Bragin. First he didn’t speak; now he has gotten out of hand.
Karp Drobin. But he hasn’t answered the question.
Bobin. He will answer. (tO lAI) 140 degrees! Tell us, what do you think of the people here? Are they all listed in your book.
Lai. (importantly and distinctly) They are listed in it.
Sidor Drobin. How? How? By first and last names?
Lai. Here will be a great marvel! If I so desire, I will tell you the qualities of characteristics of each and every one of you, without knowing either your first or last names. (49)
We’ll continue with this in a later post.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
the firefly revolution
It was obvious that the Great Fly’s foreign policy would end up as comic opera, following the laws of Marx (Groucho, that is) . And so we’ve been treated to a week of amazing neo-con barking in the American press – although to be fair, neo-connerie is now an international language, and Le Monde feels obliged to publish Robert Kagan for his “opinion” about Russia. Georgia, a state that experienced a kleptocratic financed “revolution” which installed a mini-Bush who has squandered 70 percent of the state’s income on military spending, has faced off against Russia, a state that experienced a kleptocratic financed “revolution” a bit earlier – we all remember the good old days, when Clinton and Co. decided to make one last effort to re-elect a notorious drunk and one of the most corrupt politicians of modern times, Boris Yeltsin, don’t we? Or has that fact become officially a non-fact? The mouse that roared was thoroughly squashed, and it was just like Munich, the Hungarian Revolution, and that time Coca Cola replaced the classic Coke, all wrapped into one. The cause: two pieces of property that are “symbols” of Georgia’s “territorial integrity” – it is hard to even type the bogus phrases.
In the meantime, though, our governing elite has been busy trying to destroy the “territorial integrity” of Bolivia, because there a virtual dictator, a madman, and the newest Hitler – or so it seemed, before Putin became Hitler, trickily won an overwhelming plebiscite that will make it all the more difficult for the oil oligarchs to pry the eastern part of Bolivia, where the majority of the natural gas is, from the rest. But I have no doubt they will continue to work at the project, and their work will receive the unction of the American MSM, as it appears that Evo Morales can’t be democratic because (oh, I am in tears even reporting such a heinous thing!) he doesn’t believe in (sob) free (sob) markets! The sad and oppressed people of Bolivia – how can we leave them to suffer so with such a leader! It would be much kinder, I think we can all agree, to manage a split between Freedonia and Evildonia pronto.
LI used to be all about analyzing and shaking our fist at the combo of thuggery and stupidity which is the alpha and omega of the Narrative in the era of the Great Fly, but it has gotten sooooo hard, campers, to even fuckin' care. There is nothing that whittles away dissent like pointlessness. And besides, reality is doing an excellent job of shrinking misused power. The vast majority of Americans can give a fuck about the elite class’s Russophobic woody. And the elite can give a fuck about any interference with the Narrative. What is odd is that they even care, at this point, to justify the unjustifiable. But they are moral mavens all, and can’t make a step without patting themselves on the back for their morality. Morality is very important, especially as, without it, murdering people you don’t know looks oh so nasty. Robert Kagan could just as easily write in telegraphese: “Need to attack X. Money for defense industry needs to grow grow grow. Lie lie lies. Freedom. Free markets. Democracy.” The to and fro of opinion among a small circle – the liberal interventionists on one side, so against genocide, don’t you know, and the neocons on the other, so for that there democracy - is so stale that it is a wonder.
However, it does look like a decade of ulcerous imperialism is fresh out of resources. Squandering the military was partly the point – one does need some excuse to spend a couple trillion on useless military equipment. But we seem to have come up against a certain limit. Thus, this week’s spectacle, one to make the angels fart. (And speaking of squandering resources: although LI is no deficit hawk, even we were stunned that the U.S. ran a plus 100 billion dollar deficit for June. That can start to run into real money – and makes the current projection of a deficit of 480 billion dollars seem utopian. I predicted, in January, an employment rate by the end of the year of 6 percent – when the economists were predicting, at most, 5. Now my estimate is in the middle. So I’ll just haul off and say, if the U.S. doesn’t run a 600 billion dollar deficit this year, I’ll eat my baseball cap.)
As we know, war is the health of the post-WWII economy. But as the US has been popping wars like Hugh Hefner on a viagra jag, the effect has gotten muted. Sure, Iraq has been very very good to us – the excuse for vast government spending, the pipeline of unsupervised money flowing out to a great network of greedy, incompetent corporations to pay for some of the shoddiest work ever to bear the fine name of Brown and Root. In one of the numerous ironies of the Great Fly’s era, the money has actually benefited the Democratic demographic the most. Since these have been the years of the financial sector and the tech sector – which are concentrated in liberal urban areas – we’ve witnessed a pretty funny spectacle – red states voting for their own destitution, and Blue states, awash with cash, voting for virtue. But we are now feeling the rough edge of short term gains - you know, if you are going to have a tax holiday all the time, brew up fine, fine wars killing masses of unimportant people, and borrow money like there is no tomorrow, circumstances tend, after a while, to the red line. Which is why, much to the MSM’s amazement – who among the “thought leaders” is not, after all, a millionaire? – the country is stubbornly resisting the call to manliness. While the GOP has barely found its mojo with the stupid demographic this year – destroying the American environment on a deeper and more extensive level to bring oil into the market ten years from now at a price that will be determined by the demand in that market, which ain’t gonna be ten dollars per barrel, is just the kind of pisspoor, redneck thinking that is a winner among the exurban crowd – it seems to be having a trouble exciting the gonads of the outliers with its visions of ultraviolence. Luckily for Raytheon, the Dems, in a perfect position to take away the monopoly on foreign policy which they ceded, at the beginning of the Clinton years, to the GOP, have displayed the instincts of cowering puppies and tried to bark as loudly as toothless McCain about this farce of an issue. Somebody around Obama needs to read White Fang – an excellent tale about the consequences of breeding dysfunctional aggression, although, of course, larded with London’s social darwinism.
“Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him. Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees of Gray Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips of Mit-sah and Gray Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying "Raa! Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.
But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered -- the clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge. Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.”
In the meantime, though, our governing elite has been busy trying to destroy the “territorial integrity” of Bolivia, because there a virtual dictator, a madman, and the newest Hitler – or so it seemed, before Putin became Hitler, trickily won an overwhelming plebiscite that will make it all the more difficult for the oil oligarchs to pry the eastern part of Bolivia, where the majority of the natural gas is, from the rest. But I have no doubt they will continue to work at the project, and their work will receive the unction of the American MSM, as it appears that Evo Morales can’t be democratic because (oh, I am in tears even reporting such a heinous thing!) he doesn’t believe in (sob) free (sob) markets! The sad and oppressed people of Bolivia – how can we leave them to suffer so with such a leader! It would be much kinder, I think we can all agree, to manage a split between Freedonia and Evildonia pronto.
LI used to be all about analyzing and shaking our fist at the combo of thuggery and stupidity which is the alpha and omega of the Narrative in the era of the Great Fly, but it has gotten sooooo hard, campers, to even fuckin' care. There is nothing that whittles away dissent like pointlessness. And besides, reality is doing an excellent job of shrinking misused power. The vast majority of Americans can give a fuck about the elite class’s Russophobic woody. And the elite can give a fuck about any interference with the Narrative. What is odd is that they even care, at this point, to justify the unjustifiable. But they are moral mavens all, and can’t make a step without patting themselves on the back for their morality. Morality is very important, especially as, without it, murdering people you don’t know looks oh so nasty. Robert Kagan could just as easily write in telegraphese: “Need to attack X. Money for defense industry needs to grow grow grow. Lie lie lies. Freedom. Free markets. Democracy.” The to and fro of opinion among a small circle – the liberal interventionists on one side, so against genocide, don’t you know, and the neocons on the other, so for that there democracy - is so stale that it is a wonder.
However, it does look like a decade of ulcerous imperialism is fresh out of resources. Squandering the military was partly the point – one does need some excuse to spend a couple trillion on useless military equipment. But we seem to have come up against a certain limit. Thus, this week’s spectacle, one to make the angels fart. (And speaking of squandering resources: although LI is no deficit hawk, even we were stunned that the U.S. ran a plus 100 billion dollar deficit for June. That can start to run into real money – and makes the current projection of a deficit of 480 billion dollars seem utopian. I predicted, in January, an employment rate by the end of the year of 6 percent – when the economists were predicting, at most, 5. Now my estimate is in the middle. So I’ll just haul off and say, if the U.S. doesn’t run a 600 billion dollar deficit this year, I’ll eat my baseball cap.)
As we know, war is the health of the post-WWII economy. But as the US has been popping wars like Hugh Hefner on a viagra jag, the effect has gotten muted. Sure, Iraq has been very very good to us – the excuse for vast government spending, the pipeline of unsupervised money flowing out to a great network of greedy, incompetent corporations to pay for some of the shoddiest work ever to bear the fine name of Brown and Root. In one of the numerous ironies of the Great Fly’s era, the money has actually benefited the Democratic demographic the most. Since these have been the years of the financial sector and the tech sector – which are concentrated in liberal urban areas – we’ve witnessed a pretty funny spectacle – red states voting for their own destitution, and Blue states, awash with cash, voting for virtue. But we are now feeling the rough edge of short term gains - you know, if you are going to have a tax holiday all the time, brew up fine, fine wars killing masses of unimportant people, and borrow money like there is no tomorrow, circumstances tend, after a while, to the red line. Which is why, much to the MSM’s amazement – who among the “thought leaders” is not, after all, a millionaire? – the country is stubbornly resisting the call to manliness. While the GOP has barely found its mojo with the stupid demographic this year – destroying the American environment on a deeper and more extensive level to bring oil into the market ten years from now at a price that will be determined by the demand in that market, which ain’t gonna be ten dollars per barrel, is just the kind of pisspoor, redneck thinking that is a winner among the exurban crowd – it seems to be having a trouble exciting the gonads of the outliers with its visions of ultraviolence. Luckily for Raytheon, the Dems, in a perfect position to take away the monopoly on foreign policy which they ceded, at the beginning of the Clinton years, to the GOP, have displayed the instincts of cowering puppies and tried to bark as loudly as toothless McCain about this farce of an issue. Somebody around Obama needs to read White Fang – an excellent tale about the consequences of breeding dysfunctional aggression, although, of course, larded with London’s social darwinism.
“Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him. Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees of Gray Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips of Mit-sah and Gray Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying "Raa! Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.
But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered -- the clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge. Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.”
Friday, August 15, 2008
hegelophobia
I know that kind of man
its hard to hold the hand
of anyone
who's reaching for the sky just to surrender
Amie, in the comments, writes that she has a question about my last two posts about the image of the limited good:
“It relates to the question of time and when wishes still "worked" and the limit where they seemingly went away - for good. Did they ever, "really"? I wonder if there is not always a non-contemporarity of time, a multiple and disjointed time, in which wishes and hopes still hold sway, return and burst forth.”
This is an excellent question, in as much as it makes me realize that I might have given a too hasty impression, in the last two posts, that I’ve seized a key to all history or something. My goal from the beginning has been to make it possible to ask the question: why did happiness take on the tripart form of an emotional norm, a judgment on life, and a reference that justifies political and economic arrangements? And all the themes I have been pursuing have been related to both making that question possible – that is, attacking the notion that man self evidently wants to be happy and human social structures self-evidently are judged on whether they facilitate happiness – and showing how the self-evident came into being. I’ve wanted to avoid a totalizing history – which means that I don’t think I can explain everything by simply showing that one set of dominant economic attitudes or practices gave way to another, or one episteme gave way to another – because, well, the time in which wishes still work is still part of our time – that is, as the past in which wishes still worked and the future in which wishes will work again. In fact, the triple function of happiness both occludes and supports itself on a disjointed sense of time.
To put this in terms of my obsession of the month – the war between enlightenment and superstition – that superstition is perennially being driven out and perennially coming back should warn any historian against taking his or her periodizations as natural laws, or stages in some predetermined, unalterable progress. Zatorski’s article (from my August 6 post), which gathers together several of Lichtenberg’s comments about superstition, nicely binds together the notion of discovery, science, and the peculiarity of the “again” – the Wiederkehr:
“The philosophy of the common man is the mother of ours, out of his superstitions we make our religion, just as we make our medicine out of his home remedies.” Even the concept “science” itself is observed to be highly unclear: “Where in the past one found the borders of science, we now find its middle.”
This demands a high degree of judgmental foresight. A quantum of distrust is evidently indispensable, but this means, at the same time, a certain distrust against dogmatic laws of reason. One would rather “neither deny nor believe.” For even the offerings of “rational” philosophy is nothing other than a treaty of peace that has come to stand “in the “counsels of men” – “superstition is itself a local philosophy, it also gives in its voice.” For this reason, even reason must remain continually conscious of the relative and time conditioned character of knowledge. Thus it would be adviseable to be very careful in labeling certain beliefs as superstitions, because what counts as such today can be transformed tomorrow into a serious theory: “There is thus a great difference between believing something “still” and believing it “again.” To still believe that the moon effects plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again shows philosophy and reflection.”
Foucault’s Les mots et les choses has been both a great help to me, figuring out the 17th and 18th century, and a great target. In MC, he writes, in the section on exchange, something which I’ve pondered a great deal:
“Une réforme de la monnaie, un usage bancaire, une pratique commerciale peuvent bien se rationaliser, se développer, se maintenir ou disparaître selon des formes propres ; ils sont toujours fondés sur un certain savoir: savoir obscur qui ne se manifeste pas pour lui-même en un discours, mais dont les nécessités sont identiquement les mêmes que pour les théories abstraites ou les spéculations sans rapport apparent à la réalité. Dans une culture et à un moment donné, il n'y a jamais qu’ une épistémè, qui définit les conditions de possibilité de tout savoir.”
“A monetary reform, a banking protocol, a commercial practice can very well be rationalized, develop and maintain itself or disappear according to its own forms; they are always founded on a certain knowledge: obscure knowledge which doesn’t manifest itself for itself in a discourse, but of which the necessities are identically the same as for the abstract theories and speculations without apparent relation to reality. In a culture and at a certain given moment, there is never more than one episteme, which defines the condition of the possibility of all knowledge.”
I have to kick against this. In order to make this claim, Foucault has to systematically diminish the moments in which abstract theories, or real practices, are openly self reflexive. Knowledge isn’t just endlessly productive – that is, one discovery after another founded on a certain obscure knowledge – but it is also controversial. That’s why superstition is so important – here you can see that there is, in fact, more than one episteme, and that the past is not quietly and submerged, to form an archaeological strata, but persists and returns. Thus, Foucault’s emphasis on representation as the dominant episteme of the classical age simply doesn’t explain the strategic aspect of the enlightenment – there are no other powers at play, here. Self reflection leaps out of philosophy and into real life when it becomes apparent that there are other powers at play. One shouldn’t shy away from self reflection out of Hegelophobia.
its hard to hold the hand
of anyone
who's reaching for the sky just to surrender
Amie, in the comments, writes that she has a question about my last two posts about the image of the limited good:
“It relates to the question of time and when wishes still "worked" and the limit where they seemingly went away - for good. Did they ever, "really"? I wonder if there is not always a non-contemporarity of time, a multiple and disjointed time, in which wishes and hopes still hold sway, return and burst forth.”
This is an excellent question, in as much as it makes me realize that I might have given a too hasty impression, in the last two posts, that I’ve seized a key to all history or something. My goal from the beginning has been to make it possible to ask the question: why did happiness take on the tripart form of an emotional norm, a judgment on life, and a reference that justifies political and economic arrangements? And all the themes I have been pursuing have been related to both making that question possible – that is, attacking the notion that man self evidently wants to be happy and human social structures self-evidently are judged on whether they facilitate happiness – and showing how the self-evident came into being. I’ve wanted to avoid a totalizing history – which means that I don’t think I can explain everything by simply showing that one set of dominant economic attitudes or practices gave way to another, or one episteme gave way to another – because, well, the time in which wishes still work is still part of our time – that is, as the past in which wishes still worked and the future in which wishes will work again. In fact, the triple function of happiness both occludes and supports itself on a disjointed sense of time.
To put this in terms of my obsession of the month – the war between enlightenment and superstition – that superstition is perennially being driven out and perennially coming back should warn any historian against taking his or her periodizations as natural laws, or stages in some predetermined, unalterable progress. Zatorski’s article (from my August 6 post), which gathers together several of Lichtenberg’s comments about superstition, nicely binds together the notion of discovery, science, and the peculiarity of the “again” – the Wiederkehr:
“The philosophy of the common man is the mother of ours, out of his superstitions we make our religion, just as we make our medicine out of his home remedies.” Even the concept “science” itself is observed to be highly unclear: “Where in the past one found the borders of science, we now find its middle.”
This demands a high degree of judgmental foresight. A quantum of distrust is evidently indispensable, but this means, at the same time, a certain distrust against dogmatic laws of reason. One would rather “neither deny nor believe.” For even the offerings of “rational” philosophy is nothing other than a treaty of peace that has come to stand “in the “counsels of men” – “superstition is itself a local philosophy, it also gives in its voice.” For this reason, even reason must remain continually conscious of the relative and time conditioned character of knowledge. Thus it would be adviseable to be very careful in labeling certain beliefs as superstitions, because what counts as such today can be transformed tomorrow into a serious theory: “There is thus a great difference between believing something “still” and believing it “again.” To still believe that the moon effects plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again shows philosophy and reflection.”
Foucault’s Les mots et les choses has been both a great help to me, figuring out the 17th and 18th century, and a great target. In MC, he writes, in the section on exchange, something which I’ve pondered a great deal:
“Une réforme de la monnaie, un usage bancaire, une pratique commerciale peuvent bien se rationaliser, se développer, se maintenir ou disparaître selon des formes propres ; ils sont toujours fondés sur un certain savoir: savoir obscur qui ne se manifeste pas pour lui-même en un discours, mais dont les nécessités sont identiquement les mêmes que pour les théories abstraites ou les spéculations sans rapport apparent à la réalité. Dans une culture et à un moment donné, il n'y a jamais qu’ une épistémè, qui définit les conditions de possibilité de tout savoir.”
“A monetary reform, a banking protocol, a commercial practice can very well be rationalized, develop and maintain itself or disappear according to its own forms; they are always founded on a certain knowledge: obscure knowledge which doesn’t manifest itself for itself in a discourse, but of which the necessities are identically the same as for the abstract theories and speculations without apparent relation to reality. In a culture and at a certain given moment, there is never more than one episteme, which defines the condition of the possibility of all knowledge.”
I have to kick against this. In order to make this claim, Foucault has to systematically diminish the moments in which abstract theories, or real practices, are openly self reflexive. Knowledge isn’t just endlessly productive – that is, one discovery after another founded on a certain obscure knowledge – but it is also controversial. That’s why superstition is so important – here you can see that there is, in fact, more than one episteme, and that the past is not quietly and submerged, to form an archaeological strata, but persists and returns. Thus, Foucault’s emphasis on representation as the dominant episteme of the classical age simply doesn’t explain the strategic aspect of the enlightenment – there are no other powers at play, here. Self reflection leaps out of philosophy and into real life when it becomes apparent that there are other powers at play. One shouldn’t shy away from self reflection out of Hegelophobia.
cooking liberally
Good old Julia Childs. In my roll of liberals who softened American manners and humanized its politics, Childs is up there, along with Rachel Carson and John Kenneth Galbraith and William Whyte and C. Wright Mills and James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, the Abstract Expressionists, Rauschenberg, the Black Mountain poets... oh, all under the shadow of the missiles. So now it appears that she, like Marcuse, was in the OSS.
Currently, my roll would include Amy Trubek, whose book, Taste of Place, I just reviewed. I don’t know if I expressed my true and heartfelt love for Ms. Trubek in the review – but I did my best. Here’s an interview with her. Somebody should give this woman a tv show.
Currently, my roll would include Amy Trubek, whose book, Taste of Place, I just reviewed. I don’t know if I expressed my true and heartfelt love for Ms. Trubek in the review – but I did my best. Here’s an interview with her. Somebody should give this woman a tv show.
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