the privilege of turn 1 (revised)

Anthony, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1670-1713) was born into a title that had been given to his grandfather, the first earl, who was the giant of the family. The First Earl was one of the grandees who designed the proto-whig culture that opposed James II, and brought about his downfall. He was the patron of John Locke, whom he first employed as a physician, then encouraged as a patron, used as a pamphleteer, made the entremetteur for his son, Anthony, the second earl (who married the woman Locke found for him) and finally employed to tutor his grandchildren. By chance (although it is a chance that one is not surprised at in class bound Britain) two of the English philosophers, Shaftesbury and Mill, could claim to be entirely educated by the reigning English philosopher that preceded them – respectively, Locke and Bentham.

The third earl Shaftesbury dutifully followed in his grandfather’s footsteps – his father seems to have been an entirely ineffectual man – in promoting the Whig policy, first under William, then under Anne. On becoming the head of the house after his father’s death, he took over the running of the family estate, too. All of these burdens destroyed his health. He begins a typical letter to the manager of his estate, John Wheelock, in November 1703, like this:

“I am sorry to hear all things are so low and tenants so disheartened. The greater must be my frugality and care to repair the great wounds I have made in my estate. I shall keep in my compass of ₤ 200 for the year that I stay here [in Holland], and if this does not do it shall be yet less, and the time longer, for I will never return to be as I was of late richly poor; that is to say, to live with the part of a rich man, a family and house such as I have, and yet in debt and unable to do any charity or bestow money in any degree.” In another letter that same year, he writes:

“I should have been glad to have lived in the way that is called hospitable in my country, but experience has but too well shown me that I cannot do it. Nor will I ever live again as I have done and spend to the full of my estate in house and a table. I must have werhewithal to do good out of my estate, as well as feed a family, maintain a set of idle servants entailed upon me, and a great mass of building yet more expensive. If my estate cannot, besides my house and rank, yield me five or six hundred pounds a year to do good with (as that rank requires), my house and rank may both go together, come what will of them, or let the world say what they will, they shall both [be] to ruin for me...”

In the next decade, fighting a mysterious sickness and bouts of ‘melancholia”, Shaftesbury, like many indebted British nobles, economized by remaining for long seasons on the Continent. In his last journey to Italy in 1711, when he was deathly ill with shortness of breath – he’d been told, or believed at least, that the coal fires of London were to cause for his asthma, and was going to stay in Naples to breath the air there, and because it was cheap – he writes to Wheelock:


“As good a husband as I have been (and my wife surely the best housewife as well as wife, nurse and friend that ever was known in her whole sex), I have not been able to keep with the expense proposed, but have expended at least a hundred pund a month by Bryan’s reckoning, I fear I shall be little able to diminish it. But it will not be, I trust in God (and can surely presume), much beyond this present compass. If I live my family and paternal estate will not (I hope) be prejudiced by this remittance out of it for my subsistence...”

It was while in Naples that he completed the book that made him famous: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.

LI has been reading one essay from that mass: ‘Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of wit and humor’. Shaftesbury’s reputation rather waned in the twentieth century, until Gadamer mentioned this essay in Truth and Method, since, of course, Gadamer’s book is concerned, in part, with the analysis of common sense. Both Gadamer and Habermas instigated an interest in the formation of the public sphere in the Enlightenment that has produced ever swelling torrent of books and articles, and Shaftesbury was revived, to an extent, as a spokesperson for sociability.

Myself, I’ve been struck by the discrepancy between this secondary literature and Shaftesbury’s writings. The secondary literature might persuade the reader to regard Shaftesbury as a sort of philosophical etiquette writer, decorous, a bore. But reading Sensus Communis and, especially, Shaftesbury’s notebook - which he entitled Askemata, or exercises, but which was published as the Philosophical Regimen – I’ve been struck, instead, by Shaftesbury’s near madness. His Philosophical Regimen, which has sunk into total obscurity, is a document that is as strange in its way as Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. John Stuart Mill fled to the Lake Poets for relief from his early teaching. Shaftesbury fled to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and yet one can still hear the voice of his tutor in the dense cloud of question marks and comments.

Let me end this with a quote from one of the letters about said tutor. This is to one of Shaftesbury’s admirers, Michael Ainsworth, June 3, 1709:


It was Mr. Locke that struck the home blow: for Mr Hobbes character and base slavish principles in government took off the poison of his philosophy. ‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order aand virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds. Innate is a word he poorly plays upon; the right word, though less used, is connatural. For what has birth of progress of the foetus out of the womb to do in this case? The question is not about the time the ideas entered, or the moment that one body came out of the other, but whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, at such or such a time, sooner of later (no matter when), the idea and sense of order, administration, and a God, will not infallibly, inevitably, necessarily spring up in him.

Then comes the credulous Mr. Locke, with his Indian, barbarian stories of wild nations, that have no such idea (travellers, learned authors! and men of truth! and great philosophers! have informed him), not considering that is but a negative upon a hearsay, and so circumstantiated that the faith of the Indian danger may be as well questioned as the veracity or judgment of the relater; who cannot be supposed to know sufficiently the mysteries and secrets of those barbarians: whose language they but imperfectly know; to whom we good Christians have by our little mercy given sufficient reason to conceal many secrets from us, as we know particularly in respect of simples and vegetables, of which, though, we got the Peruvian bark, and some other noble remedies, yet it is certain taht through the cruelty of the Spaniards, as they have owned themselves, many secrets in medicinal affairs have been suppressed.”

Congratulations, IT, on post 1000

IT has just logged her 1000th post. Alas, although I have thrown my typical Yankee fascist careerist advice at her – that she should be a regular writer for the Guardian, as she has a popular tone, leftist theory coming out of her fingernails, and a knack for hot button femme kultcha issues - does she listen to me? Does anybody? I think she is afraid of waking up one morning after a night of strange dreams to find that she’s been transformed into Polly Toynbee – or worse, Julia Burchill.

She’s been on a roll with her series about what women talk about in the movies, which has somehow come to center on Sex and the City. I’m not sure how the Bechdel Test, as she calls it, deals with women playing men, vide Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan. h I’d urge extending the topic to misogyny in movies, partly because some kindly soul put up half of the short film by Jean Eustache, Une sale histoire, which is a story of a man who becomes obsessed with staring through a hole bored in the wall between the men’s and women’s toilet in a cafe. He tells the story to three women, one of them the amazing Françoise Lebrun, who played Veronika in La Maman et la putaine. In “A dirty Story”, this is the narrator’s explanation for the end of his brief episode of voyeurism. “I stopped because I had the impression, in the end, that everything could only be seen in the perspective of that hole.” Eustache was appalled, I think, by the way in which danger had dropped out of sex - in this he was like Mailer, who viewed the pill as another zombie move by Dow chemical to replace our vital fluids with some liquid we had to pay rent on. Eustache was appalled by the sheer sloppiness of the post May 68 left. He despaired that what had been born was nothing more than a culture of excuses for sloth, promiscuity, and the shutting down of empathy - in particular, the latter. Empathy was, after all, what held the left together for a century - an empathy between the intellectual and the worker, between the workers themselves, between the people and the party. Of course, this was a history of empathy abused, and we all know how it worked out. But the reaction to the crackup - what Eustache saw as a generation that used leftleaning themes as a sort of tinsel thrown over a bloated egotism that could as easily tip, third way-ishly, into the most brutal capitalism - killed him.

Recently, in Le Monde, the book blogger, Pierre Assouline, wrote a post (that it is impossible to imagine being printed by a major paper in the Anglosphere) which grew nostalgia for that era of diffuse energies that Eustache despised. It was an obituary for Tony Duvert, a novelist of the sixties and seventies, friend of Roland Barthes, and a pedophile. Or rather, his novels exalted the love of pre-adolescent boys, and combined that theme with a familiar gay misogyny (the kind of denigration of women that was apparently part of Foucault’s conversational repertoire, at least according to James Miller, his biographer). This, I should say, I am taking on faith from Assouline, having never read Duvert. Assouline surveys the progressive isolation of Duvert, who in the end was, apparently, without a publishing house:

Sa liberté de ton, louée dans les années de la libération sexuelle, serait intolérable. Les ligues hurleraient aussitôt à l’apologie de la pédophilie et obtiendraient leur interdiction à la vente. Il défendait un principe, le droit des adolescents à disposer de leur libre sexualité, qui serait inaudible aujourd’hui. D’autant qu’il voulait retirer les enfants aux mères et, d’une manière générale, aux femmes ; il leur contestait un droit exclusif sur les enfants. “La période d’innocence qui s’offrait aux artistes dans les années 70 est révolue : on ne peut plus parler librement de ces choses en ce moment” disait récemment François Nourissier qui l’admirait. Il y a trente ans, on pouvait le lire comme un moraliste, chose devenue impensable de nos jours où il aurait été dénoncé comme immoraliste s’il lui avait pris de s’exprimer.

...

I’m hoping, now that there are two of Jean Eustache’s films up on YouTube, that someone will upload his Le Cochon – which, contrary to what one may expect, is – so I have read – appreciative and lyrical of the art of slaughtering a hog. This sounds excellent to me. I think the reason that I have seen only one Hanecke film is that the one I saw is about a boy who is inspired to kill a girl after watching a video of a hog being killed – using a stun gun. We are apparently supposed to look upon this with horror. I found that so utterly meretricious that I have been reluctant to look at a Hanecke film since. I certainly don’t look on killing a pig with horror – I mean, it isn’t as if I think pork was magically transported to my favorite bbq place from fairy land. Similarly, I never felt any repulsion to the scene in Roger and Me when some down on her luck woman raising rabbits for sale kills one and skins it.

I am repulsed, on the contrary, that there is such tender feeling about the bloody everyday facts of life. I can’t help but think that our tenderness about these things is in direct proportion to the spread of factory farming. The more tenderhearted the movie audience is about elementary butchery, the more leeway agribusiness has to raise and slaughter animals any way they like to. Back when Eustache was filming a good, healthy hog butchery, in the sixties, a hog was raised right, instead of as they are raised today, in the ghastly hog concentration camps.

Hmm, I’ve gotten a little off topic...

all about foodviews

LI reader's might be interested in my review of two food books here. Hmm, the title of the review is a little more scary than what's inside - it is all about foodviews!

I have high hopes for this review. If it catches the eye of some soul on the board of education, maybe it will suggest that the U.S., or at least Austin, should imitate the French and institute a semaine du goût. The American descent towards obesity and diabetes, which stems from our agribusinesses and inequalities, cannot be overturned by teaching children to look at taste before quantity or energy (sugar), but it can't hurt.

Cosi 3

It smells like girl
It smells like girl

LI suspects that, by the very nature of my research into the roots of happiness, I sometimes leave the impression that it was all a mistake. That the happiness culture was a terrible thing.

That doesn’t actually reflect my opinion. My liberalism amounts to this: avoiding totalizing viewpoints. From one point of view, the mutual bond between the nascent happiness culture and the nascent market culture was a disaster from the beginning. From another point of view, it was progress. One and the same observer could move between those two points of view, and often did, in the eighteenth century. Of course, I’m not pretending, either, that those were the only two points of view on what was happening, simply two conflicting assessments. What is striking, however, is that gradually, the ability to pose questions about what happiness is, and about the passional norms which supposedly underlie individual lives and collectivities, were increasingly blocked by the assumption that one has to begin with the self evident – even though, as we can see again and again in the 19th and 20th centuries, attempts to systemize the passions, to impress a vocabulary upon them that reflects their “universal” nature, continually produces inconsistencies. This region of social and personal life proves very hard to organize.

In Cosi fan tutte, we have an example of a fairy tale like failure to organize the passions on a traditional basis, followed by an ending that makes the astonishing proposal that this is all right. Reason tells us that we are not the dupes of passion, unless we hold to an unreal notion of passion. Now, this is what I think Tallyrand meant by the sweetness of life. It is an exploration, on the aesthetic plane, of Hume’s extraordinary and revolutionary phrase that reason should be the slave of the passions.

But first: some material context, from the trade in sex.

Report by Pidansat de Mairobert, published in the Espion anglais, 1784, concerning the maison de madame Gourdan, the most famous brothel in Paris:

“Pass now to the piscine. This is the bath where one introduces the girls that are recruited ceaselessly for Mme Gourdan, in the provinces, the country side and among the people of Paris. Before producing some like subject for her amateur, who would recoil in horror if he saw her coming out of her village or shack, we clean her up in this place (on le decrasse en ce lieu), we soften the skin, whiten it, perfume it, in a word, one curries a cinderella as one would prepare a superb horse.

They opened next an armoir, where there were a number of essences, liquids and waters for the usage of ladies.
They pointed out “l’eau de pucelle”.”

Mme Gourdan, like the most advanced pinmaker, understood something of the power of the division of labor, and she understood how to leverage her position in the sex market. It was a market that was pushed by two factors: on the one hand, the quantity of the labor supply was in direct proportion to the violence to which girls were customarily subject in their homes and workplaces; on the other hand, the clientele were specialists in the special – they were always leaping to new fetishistic niches.

So, the supply: these dirty recruits were recruited by a floating group of watchers. According to Eugene DeFrance, from whose biography of the La Maison de Madame Gourdon I take these notes, here is a typical scouting report from Mlle Caroline, a dancer with the Theatre des Italiens and one of Madame Gourdon’s sources:

“If you wish, my dear maman, on my street I have a pretty little bourgoise, 14 years old, who stays with a step mother who beats her twenty times a day. I will bring her to you; she has strongly urged me. I could easily have her received by Vaugien; the little one will gladly give herself to his fantasies, I’ve already told him about it. She’ll agree to anything on the condition that she leaves her wicked step mother. Please write me back as soon as possible, dear maman, etc.” (103)

The Vaugien in question is a vice cop.

Then, on the other hand, there was advertising and marketing. Apparently if you were a wealthy enough man in Paris, you would receive solicitations and advertisements for girl just as, today, you receive spam email offering you zero percent home loans. Like a butcher knows the choicest cuts, Goudon was an expert in the charcuterie of girl. The English Spy interviewed a Madame Sapho, who recounted her story: a peasant girl from the environs of Paris who Goudon kindly helped elope from her guardians, and stashed with an associate. The associate wrote, “what a Peru you’ve found in this child! ... she has a diabolical clitoris and she will be better for women then man. Our most illustrious tribades ought to pay for our latest acquisition in Gold!”

Goudon in fact had a client – a woman who was a member of a club of lesbians – who she hurried to with the news, and Madame Sapho was on her way up in the world.

In fact, Goudon was more than a simple bawd. She was a connector. A doctor’s wife, in debt, wants to sell her charms? Goudon would send a letter to one of the amateurs who she knew. She’d arrange a meeting. Sometimes, she’d spot a likely girl and arrange, under a false pretext, a meeting that would result in a rape.

All of this is happening under the nose of the opera, so to speak.

More about this at LCC.

A factory for making universals in the bowels of the folk consciousness

In Brown’s book on Cosi fan Tutte, which is a treasure trove of quotations, there is a passage from Jonathan Miller [who LI once shared a drink with, ho ho] explaining how he envisions the opera, and particularly the role of Don Alfonso. It is Alfonso who begins the action with a bet: he bets Ferrando and Guglielmo, two soldiers, cento zecchini, that he can prove their fiances can be seduced in a day. It is simply a matter of rearranging the tableau – by a simple ploy, he has the two announce they are going away, then has them disguise themselves and has each soldier woo the other’s fiance. A recto, we have Despina, the maid who tries to convince Fiordiligi and Dorabella that all men are essentially fickle, especially soldiers. Miller views all of this in the light of Don Alfonso’s fundamental motive:

“I have always seen him as a genuine eighteenth-century philosopher, a mixture of Diderot and Voltaire, and this means that the opera then becomes an experiment with human nature. In the first scene, to show him as a philosopher and not a joker, I had him appear at a table covered with books and classical references – the drawings of Sir William Hamilton’s Neapolitan Collections, some of Galvani’s early experiments on animal electricity, and thee might be a mesmeric tub in his room. He is interested in all these scientific and intellectual developments of the Enlightenment. The view that ultimately all human beings are the same because all individuals partake in the nature of Man is an eighteenth century idea. It follows that if there is any escape from a basic human nature it is achieved only by acknowledging those parts of oneself that cannot be altered.”

Diderot and Voltaire would not have recognized that the choice was between being either a philosopher or a joker – but this aside – and I bracket it now only to make a promise that I will come back to it later, because it is of the utmost importance to see how Mozart deals with such assumptions about the codes of seriousness - there is a lot of sense in Miller’s notion. One can’t help noticing that this is an opera that deals with another world of seduction than Don Juan’s. Don Juan’s was limited by hell on one side and marriage on the other. He traverses that world as an adventurer, believing in neither estate – and yet, by his behavior, by the life defining importance he grants these limits even as he opposes them, showing them a kind of respect. The libertine of the 17th century was taking a bet him or herself – Pascal’s bet – but the notion that hellfire might wait at the end of it was not something one could easily put off when the whole weight of the order in which one had been raised depended on that assumption. Which, in turn, was nested in a system of assumptions about spirits, nature, and human beings.

There’s no question of hell in Cosi fan Tutte, although about spirits ...

boy's world

Roberto Calasso has an amazing eye for the damning quotation. He is, after all, an admirer of Karl Kraus. In The Ruin of Kasch, he devotes a chapter to the ‘anti-romantic child”, Bentham. I read that chapter yesterday, and immediately recognized that it was about the U.S., circa 2000-2008.

Here are some Bentham quotes, taken from Halevy’s book about the Utilitarians;

“Directly or indirectly, well being, in one shape or another, or in several shapes, or all shapes taken together, is the subject of every thought, and the object of every action, on the part of every known Being who is, at the same time, a sensitive and thinking being.”

“Money is the instrument of measuring the quantity of pain or pleasure. Those who ar not satisfied with the accuracy of this instrument must find some other.”

“The only common measure the nature of things affords is money.”

These statements have a familiar ring to the American ear. Surely we just heard them. Wasn’t somebody on the radio, on the news, in the office, at a restaurant just saying that? The notion that money is the measure of all things has long been common to libertarians and economists. Markets in everything is the recent title of a book particularly recommended on the economic blog circuit.

But it isn’t the debasement of this kind of thinking that interests me, or even its impossibility – Market is a term that just aches to be taken apart, since it has many meanings and is used in a wholly senseless way to cover the whole of the life of exchange. We actually live in an economy with huge market gaps, and the title market is given as an honorific to aggregate activities, such as looking for a job, that really don’t correspond to being in a market at all. The job market and the banana market are much, much different things.

But let us leave that aside. As I say, it isn’t the debasing and painfully stupid reduction of pleasure and pain to money so much as the cultural effect of the moneyist attitude which interests me. Calasso juxtaposes these phrases of Bentham with this marvelous paragraph:

“John Stuart Mill – the first guinea pig to receive a strictly Benthamite education, one based entirely on the criterion of usefulness – did not react with sumptuous delirium, as Judge Schreber would in an analogous situation. On the contrary, he managed to write a magnanimous essay on Bentham. A genuine respect and lucidity guide Mill’s words, which involuntarily reveal more than what they say on the surface. First, he offers us the most fitting definition of the Master, presenting him as “the great subversive” and, in particular, as the “chief subversive thinker of an age which has lost all that they could subvert.” Bentham was the first living tabula rasa, a stolid and insolent child who could nave no doubts because he had no experience – and would never acquire any. “He had niether an internal experience, nor external; the quiet, even tenor of his life, and his healthiness of mind, conspired to exclude him from both. He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety. He never had even the experience which sickness gives; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty-five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last. Self-consciousness that daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to whcih this age owes so much of both its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never beenb made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow creatures.”

Oh the age of boys. We are living in the full tide of it, for the Great Moderation, as the economists love to call it, which has become the Great Corruption under the ever vigilant eye of the Great Fly, has put the boys as firmly on our back as the Old Man of the Sea was on Sinbad’s. Anybody who is alive to these Benthamite strains will recognize that the same boys-will-be-boys atmosphere that heralded the runup to the war in Iraq (a war prefigured in the sales for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, Endwar, Ghostrecon, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the boy unconscious) became the blood and ouns of the Bush boom. What James Galbraith calls the Predator state requires a mentality so stripped of any other measure than money and the immediate lulls of wellbeing that it can’t even recognize experience anymore. How to do this? One has to look at the whole system – the schooling, the media, the office atmosphere, the suburbs. One has to look at it the way one looks at processed meat – in these slaughter houses they cut away the imagination, all unnecessary emotional registers, and most of all, the very idea of the negative capacity – which is, like, so gross and negative! To catch the end result of this shallowness, one has to read, say, the Freakonomics blog over a long period of time. Or attend, listen, to the yearning burning love for Bush himself – remembering that the secret of the action movie is not the movie itself, but the action figures one sells concurrently. Bush is our most perfect national doll. He is a perfect doll for boys, and the boys are sore disappointed in him. Cause, as we know, America is Boy’s Life writ large.

And where's my nobel prize???

Limited Inc – you might think our little suggestions fall dead from our pages. From my mouth to God’s deaf ear, as they say. But notice this, from our March 20, 2008 post:

“What the Government should do is place all securities under the sweeping powers of the same kind of agency that regulates drugs. And, just as drugs are tested for their real effects and approved with regulatory strings, securities too should be subject to testing (which would be in the nature of simulations) and approved, if found not to have malign side effects and found to be useful, only with their own regulatory strings. The ‘shadow’ financial system, as Roubini calls it, has become a giant ectoplasm of iffy puts and options, in a system that really has already developed the vehicles it needs for investment, thank you very much. And, as we have seen, Alien turns to the nanny state as soon as the downside whacks it. Thrust the fuckers into the light. Regulation now, regulation forever.”

And notice this, in today’s WSJ:
“Joseph Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University who won the Nobel in 2001, suggested misguided innovation itself caused the current turmoil. Noting that homeowners’ most important risk assessment is the likelihood that they can retain their home amid market volatility, Stiglitz said, “these are the problems [financial markets] should have created products to match. But they created risks, and now we’re bearing the consequences of this so-called innovation.”
There were some areas of agreement. The standards that gauge how much capital banks should hold — called Basel II for the Swiss city in which they were developed — focus too tightly on managing daily risk and not enough on handling crises. “What happens most of the time is not important,” said Scholes, noting the current financial turmoil comes on the heels of the dot-com bubble’s bursting and the Asian financial crisis of the early 1990s. “We have to learn how to handle the shocks when they occur.”
One idea that might prevent a repeat of the turmoil: a commission that would vet financial products before their release, akin the Food and Drug Administration’s evaluation of drugs before they’re released to the market. McFadden suggested, “we may need a financial-instrument administration that tests the robustness of financial instruments and approves only the uses where they can do no harm.”

I came across this quote at Marginal Revolution, the libertarian blog run out of George Mason university's economics department, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries. The bloggers denounced it as a terrible idea. If the crank libertarians are opposed to it, it must be good!